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.

Before they decide to ‘Research’

We recently presented at a colloquium at Philips Innovation Campus. One of the topics of interest was the life cycle of a challenge. Questions which were asked inspired me to write a bit more about the management of challenges, way before someone starts logging time against them. Or in case of collaborative innovation, well before the challenge starts showing up all over the place.

In short - it’s good to know the directions, especially before getting onto a free way.

So what do the best organizations do before they start putting in their time and resources on research?

They start with a “Challenge Inventory” and few good practices around it.

1)  Does your organization have a place, people and process to log a challenge? If not, you need to start here.  It could be a simple form with set of people as owners. The mode could be via your intranet website or even email.

2)  Now the best way to make your employees know that such an inventory exists, is to ask your employees to submit a challenge, the best challenge wins a prize. You must also tell what they should do when they think of a challenge in future.

Note that   it’s all about challenges and some more challenges, here we are not taking about the solutions.

It is best not to.

A challenge could be anywhere from very complex to not so complex and could be on high end technology, to just a process hiccup.

Examples are ...

• Our competition’s turnaround time for a repair call is 3 days while ours is 7 days, and we don’t have additional budget for our services division.

• Our current adhesive on the belt takes 2 hours to dry, but the print on the package fades a bit when exposed to the heat used for drying adhesive.

• For a re-launch, we want to replace our yogurt’s artificial flavor with a natural ingredient.

Never strike off an impossible looking challenge like “Our hybrid should accelerate similar to our best sports model”

 
Also when you store them in central place, all can access and leverage the previous efforts on the similar challenges.

3)  Prioritize the challenge inventory list with a set of relevant filters at that point of time. Never fix these filters upfront. The example of the filters could be ‘Natural ingredient’ (for the new launch). When you apply such a filter, all the challenges which have natural ingredient in it will go up the list and help you attack the problem from multiple directions.

Even open up a completely new possibility.

Above steps should be aimed at identifying your top X challenges and top Y domains at this point of time.  Once you do, you are armed with the information you need for initiating collaborative innovation and make an impact.

ideaken helps organizations draw up collaborative innovation strategy, benefit from open innovation and leverage co-creation.