Asia Academia & Industry – recipe for innovation success! (1 of 2)

Belief, enforcement and preaching that we are not innovative enough and we need to be more innovative are highly inaccurate and misleading!

We cannot innovate MORE by planning to innovate more. Innovation is an intersection of market dynamics, personal passion & quest for delight which follows it. Innovation will happen as long as there is a need for it to happen. The ONLY thing we as responsible citizen need to do is get out of its way, provide infrastructure and a passage for it to happen, for when it wants to happen. Period.

We won’t define innovation - it has varied meaning to different people and it is ok that way. The reason you are reading this implies you already know that Academia Industry collaboration can bring in benefits for both parties, so we will not get into why it is good and all that. Instead - We will talk about MEANS to do it. Many things I write here is part of and a derivation of information I have collected while talking to many eminent people from Academia and Industry. 

We have identified 5 key modes of engagements between academia and industry, and I will explain each of them along with challenges they face and how we think this mode of engagement will shape in the near future. And then we will talk about one key success recipe for academia and one for industry. 

We would exclude internships; industry led trainings, academic consulting etc. though they too play a role in here.

Here are these 5 modes of engagements. I will get into details for each of these in following blogs, but here is the list with concise description.

1. Niche Academic projects: Most of us ignore this as a routine activity as academia and students go on with mindset as one of the task to finish. This tiny piece holds lot into it as long as someone explores it to the extent it deserves to be explored.

2. Innovation & Design competitions: They take place all around us, but what is that one thing which can make it far more impactful in an academia industry context?

3. Competitive research funding: When you add “Competitive” word in front of ‘research funding’, can it make a bottom line difference – on ROI?
4. Starting & restarting open innovation: There are far more half baked solutions than the ones which innovators have finished working on. We will tell you why these incomplete solutions are good for their incompleteness.

5. IP commercialization: Have you recently heard a complaint from an innovator in your academia that he or she has an excellent innovation but no one wants to know about it, far from using it for their business growth. Do you wonder what wrong is prevailing?

To be continued in the next blog … (for challenges each of these modes face and how we think they will shape up, we will also talk about one key success recipe for academia and one for industry in the next blog).

ideaken as leading provider of collaborative innovation platform in Asia is now also a leading mediator for academia and industries in Asia.

Changing face of Academia Industry collaboration.

A common ground, where academia lends the conceptualization & generalization skills and the industry provides the practical reality in which the conceptualization can be rooted.

This has been and will be the root factor for this collaboration. Like every other trend, this trend too is adding another dimension to it – ‘impact’.

The expectations from the industry have risen. Not only do they look at academia for fresh ideas and primary research but they now, for a valid reason, also expect them to provide real differentiation to their outstanding problems, fulfill a need and, of course, help them make money.

Though academia has been a top source of fundamental research and know how, it also has been the biggest black hole for huge sum of funds from organizations across US and Europe. But gone or going are the days when companies invested in academic research for a tick in their strategy checklist. Gone are the days when companies never came back to see what happened to their funds, and gone are the days when an organization funded same academia, same department, headed by the same person for decades.

The reasons for this shift are many,

a) Earlier the small number of organizations who got it right, had got it right for a long time, and large number of organizations who got it wrong continued doing it wrong for a long time, and they never knew or could never admit it.

b) The most common route to industry academia collaboration has been the alumni of that academia in the respective organization as a key interface. As one can imagine this restricted the possibilities and almost made it an one to one exploration i.e. top 2-3 executives would collaborate with 2-3 academia they came from.

c) Availability of large number of fundamental innovations, be it electricity, communication technology, computing power, nanotechnology and so on, has created millions of not so fundamental but immensely beneficial applications or call it sub innovations which we all use in our daily lives.

I will leave the interpretations of above three points as to why they act as reason for the shift wherein now organizations are increasingly looking at academia for applied research and impact driven innovation, incremental innovations, even non technical and design innovations.  

Companies like ideaken play a key role in this new equation, where diverse yet systematic, based on primary research yet with sufficient social and business impact, is the new norm for academia industry collaboration.