Unlocking the Ivory Tower: How universities are forging long-term partnerships with corporations

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Kenneth R. Lutchen argues for building strong, long-standing partnerships between universities and organizations, in a much-cited article from the Harvard Business Review, “Why companies and universities should forge long-term collaborations.”

“The distinction between commercial development and early stage research,” writes Lutchen, “has traditionally been seen as a defining difference between the values of corporate culture and university culture: the bottom line versus advancing knowledge and training the next generation of scientists without regard to profit. In recent years, however, both sides have moved closer together, meeting somewhere in the middle as their missions have evolved.”

What we are witnessing is a kind of boundary spanning, or bridge building between the campus and the business world.

In fact, recently there has been an explosion of research collaboration between universities and companies, to their mutual benefit.  For universities, these partnerships provide research opportunities and financial support while companies gain access to innovative research talent.

Of course, universities and businesses working together to solve problems is not new. What is different now is that both are seeking long-term affiliations. “Instead of one-off projects, both sides have become much more interested in forging long-term, collaborative relationships,” according to Lutchen.

His example is Red Hat, which teamed with Boston University to advance research in open source and emerging technologies in an Open Cloud Computing Initiative.  The $5 million partnership includes collaborative projects as well as co-funding of Ph.D. students and post-docs.  For Red Hat this means a “pipeline of graduate students who will seriously consider jobs at the company,” writes Lutchen.

This sort of collaboration is not without its challenges because, obviously, academics and business-people have different primary objectives. Faculty are concerned with grants and publications and funding for labs and graduate students. Businesses are often up against short timelines to solve technical problems, may not have the in-house resources to bring to bear, and are understandably concerned about costs.

Also, and importantly, universities and businesses run on different clocks: the former thinking long term in its research time horizon, the latter more sharply focused on near-term results. But research has shown that thinking long term can be an advantage to businesses, according to Markus Perkmann and Ammon Salter in their MIT Sloan Management Review article, “How to Create Productive Partnerships with Universities:” “‘Going long’ with academics in the search for new ideas can unlock a range of possibilities and even help to create a new innovation ecosystem that will sustain the business five or 10 years into the future.” Besides, bringing individual research projects up to speed can be costly in time and budgets, so long-term collaborations can be more cost-effective.

My college has itself been engaged in business/academia boundary spanning. For example, as I’ve covered in a previous column, RIT Saunders College faculty partnered with Rochester’s Jewish Senior Life to use technology to improve the lives of older adults. As I wrote: “Backed by faculty, technology resources, and expertise in data design, RIT students work directly with seniors one-on-one to address technology challenges.”

More recently, faculty in Saunders College have launched a long-term collaboration with the department of Health Informatics at Rochester Regional Health (RRH), working together to solve problems at the intersection of business and technology, our bread and butter.

One project involves the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare decision making. The focus is on algorithmic decision-making systems (ADMS) to assist physicians with their diagnoses and to detect patterns in large amounts of data.

“There is still a lack of comfort with the system” among practitioners, says Matthew Phillips, vice president of Health Informatics at RRH. With that in mind, RRH invited Saunders faculty to do qualitative research into how the system is used.

“We were especially interested in qualitative research of the sort done at Saunders but not at RRH,” says Phillips. “Seemed like a good fit.”

RRH and Saunders are in the early stages of what promises to be a years-long partnership.

“We currently have three projects that are active. We’re creating a parking lot of good candidates,” says Phillips. “There might in the future be more interesting, more cutting-edge projects where we want to understand social impacts, population health management through medical records. We could get to patient care solutions at a macro level, and that could be where the real benefits are through research.”

For Phillips, the collaboration allows RRH to be part of research they simply don’t have the bandwidth for on their own. “There are huge constraints on resources in healthcare right now. We’re being asked to do more with less.”

Phillips sees some speed bumps in a university/business collaboration: “There are different timelines, flexibility around deliverables. It’s just a different view of the world, although neither is better than the other.”

“Still,” says Phillips, “I hope we can continue this — it feels right; a win-win for both RIT and us.”

As Perkmann and Salter argue, “Working with external partners allows [companies] to access different pools of knowledge and save R&D costs. Universities … allow access to an enormous global pool of talent and skills.” Further, companies can realize these benefits “during the whole life cycle of their innovation projects” when they take on long-term collaborations.

We are especially enthusiastic about our partnership with RRH as next year we will launch a new Ph.D. program in business administration. The projects that grow out of the collaboration could be attractive for new doctoral students. At the same time, we will be able to expand the impact of our research by taking on important, even critical problems.

“Saunders College has a strong tradition of generating research-based knowledge that aims to address current challenges faced by business and society,” says Shal Khazanchi, associate dean of Research and Graduate Programs. “Through our new Ph.D. program we will continue to partner with corporations to solve problems at the nexus of technology and business–locally, regionally, and nationally–and to train the next generation of scholars.”

As Matt Phillips puts it, long-term academic/business partnerships are a win-win.

Jacqueline Mozrall is dean of Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology.