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

(Continued from the previous blog on this subject).

We spoke about 5 modes of engagements between Academia and Industry in our previous blog. Here we would get into the details around “What it is”, “How it will shape”, “Recipe for success” for each of the 5 modes below.


1. Niche Academic projects:

What is it?

Niche Academic projects are the select projects in which there is some niche involved on both sides – i.e. academia and the industry.  In other words, it is a collaborative R&D but in the context of the academic projects that students are supposed to undertake in their curriculum.

How it will shape:

a) Currently most of the projects are taken up where only one side has an agenda. For example - student wants to do a project and approaches an industry, somehow he gets the approval and then industry somehow tries to provide some opportunity for him to create something which can be treated as a project. We believe that much more value can be created if somehow we connect industry and the academia on the premise where both have real interest in each other.

Recipe for success:

a) For academia: Make academic projects a whole lot relevant to industry needs.
b) For industry: Do not say yes to academic projects if you do not know what you want to do with the academic talent.
   
2. Innovation & Design competitions: 

What is it?

A contest where students are asked to submit innovative or creative solutions and ideas for a given problem statement. The purpose on industry side can vary from branding and positioning their company to the young and educated crowd. Or tap into a creative cool of new generation and feed the findings into their innovation funnel.

How it will shape:

a) Contribution from students will increase for the sense of self achievement and self fulfilment; these traits would have replaced some of the traditional expectations of getting a job after finishing education.
b) Academia would use innovation achievements for better positioning of the academia.

Recipe for success:

a) For academia: Give credit for being creative and the same should find its way into the mark sheet.
b) For industry: Provide more avenues for the students to really showcase their creativity in a meaningful way.

3. Competitive research funding:

What is it?

As the name says, it is a typical research funding but is competitive in nature. Unlike the commonly exercised way of research funding, which is either geographical proximity based or alumni driven,  here company will put up an initial challenge to call for proposals from set of academia in that region by forming teams. Only the best fit based on initial response will be given the said research funds.  This will bring diversity and the competitiveness, will also improve overall innovation throughput.

How it will shape:

a) Proximity or familiarity will give way to right match (where right match will be valued more than agenda of funding someone somehow). Proximity issues will be taken care by communication technologies and familiarity will give way to the need to be competitive.
b) Academia and Industry both worry about the black hole at the other end, wherein neither one trusts each other enough, going forward we see this comfort level will improve.

Recipe for success:

a) For academia - Strategy for research focus is one thing; you also need strategy for getting funded.
b) For industry – Industry must understand and encapsulate currently neglected academia goals, in their relationship with academia.

4. Open innovation: 

What is it?

Open innovation is a systematic inflow of external know how to accelerate enterprise innovation, resulting in a new or improved products, services, or processes, and therefore increase market share.  So OI is always about solutions which are already existing – may be the in minds of people, in labs or on a notepad. You really don’t start from scratch. Power of many, power of diversity, and Power of Pull makes this tick.

How it will shape:

a) First, though slowly, the misconception and wrong comparison with “open source” is declining and will get eliminated. Open in open innovation means problem is in the public domain, not the solutions.
b) IP related issues will get addressed by the realization and learning that these issues are no different than the IP issues they anyway face in other aspect of business. More importantly, there will be a realization that because there are ways to mange IP related challenges, same can be applied in case of open innovation.

Recipe for success:

a) For Academia: Spend less time on the solution, spending time on problem makes you far better prepared to solve something. Provide equal opportunity for your innovative talent, do not identify some folks, group them and label them as innovators.
b) For Industry: The point at which open innovation gets a chance - is moving backwards. So companies are starting to utilise open innovation at the same time they begin the work on a new product or a new challenge internally.

5. IP commercialization:

What is it?

Getting an IP in place is only a beginning in the technology world, there are lot many things needed to get the ball rolling and create value from the IP you have. Market assessment, Value assessment, information chart for Licensing or Sale, Locate and showcase technologies to prospects, Negotiate and Make Deals; are some of them and as a whole called as IP commercialization space.

How it will shape:

a) IP marketplace will be common soon; it may no longer depend too heavily on specialised skills in patent domain.
b) On the other hand IP transactions and licensing across borders will increase, in turn increasing the complexity and hence opening up new business opportunities.

Recipe for success:

a) For academia: Go pictorial to explain your IP, Crowdsource ideas within the campus, move fast.
b) For industry:  There is lot to learn from M&A concepts when it comes to IP commercialization, be in terms of bringing IP inside the company or licensing out of the company.

ideaken - a leading provider of collaborative innovation platform in Asia, is now also a leading innovation and research 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.