2021 Annual Conference: Effectiveness of University Engagements

Research and Development activities in the industries have had partnerships with the academia over many decades. However, this trend has now seen considerable growth not just domestically but also internationally. It is a recognition of the fact that new and innovative ideas in product and services can emerge from anywhere in the world and companies can benefit from this by distributing their R&D investments across multiple geographical regions. The objective of this project is to examine the effectiveness of university research engagements. The approach consists of collecting data from companies through interviews and survey questionnaires about their experience in partnering with the academia for R&D. These answers reveal essential gaps that companies feel in harnessing the research artifacts from universities towards product and service development. By analyzing this data and other publicly available sources on industrial research partnerships, we try to determine the principal factors that lead to gaps in fruitful experiences companies have in engaging with the universities. The project team will develop qualitative and quantitative metrics pertaining to these gaps to provide comparisons across different industries and at different times.