Guest editorial. Bridging the university-industry cultural gap

GUEST EDITORIAL

Bridging the University-IndustryCultural Gap

University technology can be an important economic engine, and it would beeasy to list scores of inventions and successful products to make that point. It

is also true that the transfer of technology from university laboratories to commercialapplication is extremely difficult and that much of the potential economic impactfrom that research goes untapped every year.

Some of the challenges became clear to me when I was Executive Director of Inno-vation and Technology at Tenneco, Inc., several years ago. At that time Tenneco wasa $7 billion per year company with automotive and packaging operations. The pack-aging operations, subsequently spun off into Pactiv, Inc., included paperboard anda wide range of plastic products such as Hefty® trash bags and Hefty®OneZip™storage bags. In fact, in 1996 we distributed the annual report in a paperboard coverinside a OneZip™ plastic bag.

As I pursued discussions with universities about potential research agreements,it became clear that there was a significant cultural gap to traverse. Simply put,university professors were interested in addressing complex research questionsthat could generate funding and engage graduate students over extended periods oftime and in publishing the results. Corporate researchers were more concernedwith quick answers to specific applied questions and in applying those insights toproduct or process development before the competition found out about it.

Five years ago, when I became Director of Economic Development and CorporateAffairs at the College of William and Mary (W&M), we set out to try to bridge thatgap. We started with a new intellectual property policy that gave inventors a majorshare of all university royalties, a strong incentive to disclose new ideas and helpidentify potential licensees. We encouraged collaborative research with corporationsand encouraged faculty groups in related disciplines to pool their talents in newapplied areas. We developed new organizations, including the Technology and Busi-ness Center, funded by Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology, to help com-panies get access to university resources. We also realized that although W&M hadreal strengths in niche areas in chemistry, applied science, computational science,and marine science, we had to partner with other universities to get the diversityand scale needed for large research projects. We joined with six other universitiesin Hampton Roads, the Jefferson Laboratory, and NASA Langley to form a newHampton Roads Research Partnership to promote regional capabilities and collabo-rative research projects with economic development potential.

We also recognized that intellectual property (IP) issues are a major stumblingblock in university-industry collaborations. W&M currently does about $36 millionin sponsored research each year, which is not enough to support a financially viableindependent technology transfer program. But without adequate support for IP agree-ments, faculty and potential corporate partners understandably become frustrated.To help solve our problem, we entered into a strategic agreement with the Universityof Virginia Patent Foundation to provide us with staff support for standard forms,market assessments, and program administration. Their much larger staff canprovide those services at much lower costs than we can. Just as importantly, ourDirector, Technology Transfer Program, can concentrate on work with companiesand faculty.

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© 2004 Society of Plastics EngineersPublished online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).DOI: 10.1002/vnl.20015

Those steps have helped us bridge the gap, but in the final analysis, success de-pends on individual researchers who get excited about the prospect of seeing theirideas translated into new products. Bill Starnes, the editor of this journal, was oneof the early supporters of our efforts at W&M. One of his recent inventions, theresult of research funded by a consortium of private companies, shows great promisefor making PVC plastic more stable without the use of heavy metals. The commer-cial and environmental impacts of that work could be significant.

We have not solved all the problems of bridging the cultural gap between universityand corporate research. But we have made considerable progress, and we knowthat the potential gains are substantial.

James R. GoldenDirector, Economic Development and Corporate Affairs

The College of William and MaryWilliamsburg, VA 23187-8795

E-mail: jrgold@wm.edu

James R. Golden

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