Building effective university-industry links

Yesterday, NESTA hosted a series of events with Silicon Valley Connect that involved venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and academics from California.  The underlying topic was, inevitably, how to replicate (whatever that means) Silicon Valley’s success in the UK.

More specifically, however, the panel I chaired focused on how to stimulate university-industry collaboration.  It featured speakers from Stanford’s Media X programme, Turner Broadcasting, Google, a Stanford engineer and two representatives from the UK – from Cambridge Enterprises and UCL Advances.  A few clear themes emerged.

1.    University-industry collaboration is for everyone – notably, the major US corporations represented didn’t just work with MIT, Stanford and Harvard.  Indeed, many of the UK examples that Laurie Dean Baird from Turner Broadcasting used reached far beyond the usual suspects in the Russell Group – Abertay and Royal Holloway to name but two.  The critical thing is for universities to identify their strengths and to play to them.  Beacons of excellence can exist everywhere.  Let’s move past the tired UK-only debate about which universities have ‘got it’ and which haven’t.

2.    But big, prestigious universities have it easier than everyone else – a large brand name like Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial or Manchester does not guarantee that your research is better than anyone else’s.  It does, however, mean that big companies can find you with little effort – you are ‘discoverable’.  It also means that you get significant economies of scale on your investment in knowledge exchange.  It strikes me that smaller, less well-known universities need to look carefully at what their major offerings are and prioritise them.  Perhaps there’s even a market for smaller universities sharing knowledge exchange facilities – research is a ‘long tail’ exercise.

3.    People are critical – last week, we hosted another American, Carol Coletta from CEOs for Cities [insert web link] for one of out monthly policy breakfasts.  Their model was a good one – bringing major civil leaders and corporate CEOs together to work on the challenges and opportunities that cities face.  The thing that stood out to me, though, was the passion and vision of Carol.  The same happened yesterday.  On both sides of the fence, successful university-industry collaborations had champions who drove the initiative – and they were highly intelligent, driven and persistent people who were just made for the job of match-making.  This isn’t a common skillset.

4.    Look for a marriage, not a one-night stand – knowledge exchange is important, unpredictable and indirect.  Megan Smith from Google talked about the ‘surface area’ of Google’s engagement with higher education – everything from ‘pizza outreach’ on campus to paying $300,000 to Media X for unspecified ‘strategic partnership’ services. Apparent in all of the conversations was that the immediate transaction was far less important than the potential for the next one.  Something to think about when it next comes to allocating targets and metrics for tech transfer in the UK.

All in all, a very valuable experience.  As always, I’m keen to hear the thoughts of the NESTA community.