Building bridges between industry and academia

On Friday, 11 June, 32 physicists from academia and industry met at the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland, to tackle a question of importance to the US economy: How can companies and university physics departments cooperate more effectively?

The meeting was the third in a series of biannual summits organized jointly by the American Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics Today) and the American Physical Society .

It’s perhaps not surprising that physicists in industry and academia should find working together neither natural nor easy. Nowadays, companies, especially publicly traded companies, face constant pressure to raise revenue and profits. Old industrial labs, such as Bell Labs , that did long-term basic research are mainly a thing of the past or, like Xerox’s PARC labs , have been turned into separate spin-offs. The upshot is a focus on short-term initiatives that yield the highest gain for the lowest risk. By contrast, universities can engage in longer-term, curiosity-driven research. The natural time scale for academic research is the five or so years it takes a graduate student to complete a thesis, not the three months between quarterly earnings reports.

Despite the differences, there are plenty of examples of successful collaborations between industry and academia. Google famously got its start at Stanford University. Massachusetts Route 128 , the road that partially rings Boston, has long been the site of high-tech development driven, in part, by proximity to Harvard, MIT, and other local universities. NEC, Samsung, and other high-tech giants fund research institutes on university campuses in the US and elsewhere.

As several of the summit attendees attested, the key to building successful industry-academia partnerships is to recognize and respect each other’s requirements.

Educating students

One potential hurdle to better cooperation is undergraduate training. A physics department’s research enterprise depends on graduate students, nearly all of whom are physics majors produced by physics departments. Given the need to supply that pipeline, physics departments do not feel a strong incentive to include coursework in the practical skills that engineering departments routinely teach, and companies highly value.

At the summit, Bahram Roughani described how his department at Kettering University sought from the get-go to design an industry-friendly degree program. Having consulted local companies, Kettering now runs programs in applied physics and engineering physics. Both programs include senior thesis projects conducted at local companies. The projects are attractive to companies because they are short-term and because the companies retain intellectual property (IP) rights to the projects’ fruits. Edward Van Keuren described a similar program at Georgetown University.

The need to deal with industry’s shorter horizons was a common theme at the summit. Thanks to tenure, the staff of a physics department turns over slowly. Companies not only hire and fire staff more frequently, they also reassign them more frequently. Students typically have the same adviser throughout their time at a university, but if they embark on a cooperative research project in industry, their company contact could change or, worse, the project itself could be canceled.

Another potential hurdle is IP. From a university’s point of view, if one of its researchers invents a valuable device or process, the university should enjoy the financial benefits. From a company’s point of view, rewarding inventors is fine, but it should not stand in the way of turning the invention into profitable products. Companies—even rival companies—routinely license each other’s IP. Some universities insist on signing over IP as part of cooperative agreements even before the research, let alone the development, has started.

Paradoxically, one trend that springs from today’s globally competitive business climate could make it easier for companies and universities to cooperate. In his opening remarks, summit chair Fred Pinkerton of General Motors outlined how companies have moved from vertically integrated silos of homegrown R&D to a more cross-disciplinary approach that is open to ideas and collaboration with outside partners.

As if echoing GM’s Pinkerton, Purdue University’s Nick Giordano identified a similar trend in academia. Many of the world’s toughest scientific problems, like mitigating global warming, require approaches that combine not only different academic disciplines, but also a greater focus on entrepreneurship. As a byproduct, Purdue’s industrial collaborations have increased.

Charles Day