Best practices in university-industry collaboration

Monday and Tuesday I’ve been attending a 2-day conference on university-industry relations at UC Irvine at the Beckman Center, which is the West Coast home of the National Academies of Science and Engineering.

The conference is the 6th meeting of the University-Industry Development Partnership; UIDP began with its first meeting in December 2006. It is the institutional successor of the University-Industry Congress which was convened from 2003-2006 to address increasingly expensive and contentious university-industry negotiations for IP licensing. Both are under the sponsorship of the National Academies’ Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable.

The two-day conference includes both nitty-gritty negotiating sessions to hammer out the organizational structure and big picture keynotes. Among the projects being launched by the UIDP is a process for streamlining IP negotiations using planned software dubbed “turbo negotiator.”

One interesting talk was one on how UCI has succeeded in its second try to act as an innovation hub for Orange County tech entrepreneurs; another was a keynote by Henry Samueli, former UCI professor and co-founder of Broadcom. I also had my own talk on open innovation and university innovations (check back later).

However, perhaps the posting of greatest general interest to those in university relations was the summary of U-I best practices offered by UIDP’s paid staff (i.e. executive director Anthony Boccanfuso). He listed three main points developed after considerable university-industry negotiations:

1. A successful UI collaboration should support the mission of each partner. Any effort in conflict with the mission of either partner will fail. (Joel’s translation: all deals must be win-win)
2. Institutional practices and national resources should focus on fostering appropriate long term partnerships between universities and industry. (It’s more than just the money)
3. Universities and industry should focus on the benefits to each party that will result from collaborations by streamlining negotiations to ensure timely conduct of the research and the development of the research findings. (There is a finite window for commercialization)

All three of these ideas are part of a much broader report of the findings of the 2003-2006 discussion, sponsored by the NAS/NAE GUIRR. These (and much more) are contained in the 20-page booklet Guiding Principles, available for free download from the GUIRR website. (The earlier mentioned HP model of the "Partnership Continuum” can be found in Appendix A of the report).

Even though there are UIDP veterans present, participants still talk about the cultural gap between the two-sides in their expectation and mission. I think self-interest is as complete an explanation as culture — both sides are trying to maximize their returns in a zero-sum negotiation. (Growing the pie through massive adoption seems like a better options for both sides).

Photo credit: Photo of Beckman Center by Tele-Atlas via Google Earth.

Universities and open innovation

Last month, UC Santa Cruz held a seminar at the NASA Ames Research Center entitled “Managing Industry-University Partnerships in Silicon Valley”.

I rushed home from a trade show in Las Vegas to be able to hear the seminar. Firms sourcing innovations from universities is certainly open innovation, and it’s something I’m interested in studying someday in a future paper.

The panel included representatives from HP, Genentech and two from UCSC. The first speaker was Lou Witkin of the new HP Labs Open Innovation Office, who moved over after 15 years in HP Lab’s University Relations office. (It was nice to hear that Lou had heard of the book and of course had already met with Henry Chesbrough.) The other speaker was Anna Williamson, a biz dev manager for Genentech who formerly sat on the other side of the table at UC Berkeley.

The two veterans gave a good sense of both why firms get involved with universities and how to make it work. Slides were not available and I was not allowed to tape the event, but I was able to take some notes.

Witkin, in particular, offered a number of specific pointers as to both the motivations and mechanics of making university-industry relations work. One of the most interesting slides was on “The Partnership Continuum”, which mapped a transition of university-industry engagement from career fairs up to sponsored research and major donations. (This slide and some other material also appeared in a January 2008 talk by Wayne Johnson, then VP of HP’s University Relations).

Universities are part of a larger economic ecosystem, which works best if the partnerships are open, collaborative and organized around win-win principles. While American universities are often admired by their European counterparts for strong industrial relations, Witkin said such collaboration is quite common in other countries (such as Brazil and China) where government is more cooperative with industry. He cited John Kao’s book Innovation Nation as a good source for information on how other countries are doing.

Both Wiktin and Williamson emphasized the importance of establishing long-term relationships that span specific projects. Longer-term master agreements reduce the transaction costs that can cause negotiations to take months or even years. Implicit within their comments is that sometimes it can be difficult to negotiate an agreement with major universities.

In fact, universities are creating increasing pressure to view technology transfer not as a way to help business and society, but primarily to capture revenues for the university. In talking with leading academics in the technology management field last week, it was clear that I’m not alone in worrying that the pendulum has swung too far. Talk is that some large firms have shifted from the US and Europe to Russia and other less developed countries, where the negotiations are quicker and less contentious.

Williamson talked about the business reasons why Genentech wants a fairly open hand with known terms in pursuing business opportunities based on licensed technology. Then, with her former University of California hat on, she noted that universities are reluctant to grant such unrestricted licenses for fear that the partner will tie up the technology and not follow through.

Witkin referred to an article on his work with UC Berkeley in improving licensing negotiations, co-authored with Beth Burnside, vice chancellor of research for UC Berkeley. The article, “Forging Successful University-Industry Collaborations,” appeared in the March-April 2008 issue of Research-Technology Management. Another party interested in improving this process is BASIC (Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium), which has published a series of reports on improving industry-university collaboration and specific contributions local research universities can make to industry.

UCSC sponsored the event as part of its ongoing campaign to build friends for its hoped-for business school here. Plans call for the school to be located in the proposed 70 acre NASA Research Park, which would include Carnegie Mellon, Santa Clara, De Anza College and perhaps SJSU. The incredibly valuable land — at the intersection of three freeways and only a couple of miles from Google, Yahoo, Cisco and other tech companies — will someday be reused after the 1994 closure of the Navy’s Moffett Field dirigible base (later ASW base).

UCSC’s plans are ambitious and optimistic, at least if the long tribulations faced in creating the UCSD business school are any indication. But it seems better than even money that some time in the next decade, UCSC will be offering degree-granting business courses at this prime NASA site.