The following is a list of the articles that appear in the July 2019 issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar video, Metrics and Benchmarking for University Corporate Engagement: Breaking Down Silos to Gauge Performance.

University-Industry Engagement Advisor
Vol. 1, No. 7, July 2019

• Talent pipelines become critical to industry engagement in low-unemployment era. The desire of universities to educate and train their students to make them more marketable to industry, and industry’s need to find many of their future employees on college campuses, has always been a natural component of U-I collaboration. But the recent dramatic drop in unemployment has added a new element to such collaborations — an almost desperate search on the part of industry and a heightened look by academia at creating new programs to meet industry’s urgent talent needs.
• Collaboration canvas tool used to guide mid-term review with industry partners. The SIRIUS Centre for Scalable Data Access in the Oil and Gas Domain, a collaborative research organization funded by the Research Council of Norway and hosted by the University of Oslo, recently used a “hybrid” version of a collaboration canvas process designed for either university or industry use so that it could be implemented in single sessions together with industry partners.
• U of South Carolina’s new approach yields big results in corporate engagement. When the University of South Carolina transformed its approach to collaboration with industry in 2013 with the formation of its Office of Economic Engagement, perhaps few could have predicted how significant the impact would be.
• Smart city initiatives offer new avenue for industry collaboration. The need for urban areas to efficiently manage Internet of Things (IoT) assets, to become “smart cities,” is a space that has become increasingly attractive to political leaders. Recognizing that they do not have the necessary expertise in-house to take such challenges on themselves, they are frequently turning to universities (for knowledge and research) and industry (for research and bandwidth) as partners in these initiatives.
• U of Maine partners with national lab in bid to boost state lumber industry. Universities, especially land grant institutions, place a high value on research that has a positive economic development impact. That importance is magnified when a key local industry is facing serious challenges — like the lumber industry in Maine.
• To add value locally, learn to work with economic development groups. Imagine this. You are in charge of industry engagement for your university, and an economic developer is trying to convince a company to relocate to your community. The company wants your engineering school to custom train their staff. Moreover, they want to redesign the curriculum so that the school’s graduates would make good hires for their company. Or suppose, as happened in southeastern Ohio, that a major employer shuts down and hundreds of people lose their jobs.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the June 2019 issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar video, Metrics and Benchmarking for University Corporate Engagement: Breaking Down Silos to Gauge Performance.

University-Industry Engagement Advisor
Vol. 1, No. 6, June 2019

• Universities find a fertile source of industry partnerships: Their own start-ups. Start-ups are often thought of by many as seekers of financing; after all, lacking resources is part of the classic picture of companies in their early stages of development. That’s why it may come as a surprise that a number of universities are finding their own start-ups as excellent sources of funds for research — true industry partners, even as they are seeking to solidify their own futures.
• UAlbany revamps approach to corporate engagement, seeks to eliminate ‘silos.’ About 30 months ago the University at Albany – State University of New York embarked on a major transformation of its corporate engagement efforts, seeking to eliminate what it saw as significant communication breakdowns and an opportunity to better serve its industry partners.
• Strength of partnership leads to NC State’s selection in IBM quantum initiative. The long and strong partnership between NC State and IBM, and NC State’s track record in industry engagement, were key factors in its selection by IBM as the first university in North America to participate in its quantum computing “Q Hub” program, more formally known as IBM Q Network Hubs. IBM now has seven in all, including hubs at Oxford University in the UK and institutions in Australia and Japan.
• Auburn creating one-stop poultry research facility for industry partnering. Auburn University has anything but modest ambitions for the Charles C. Miller Jr. Poultry Research and Education Center. Opened in 2012, it continues to expand, and “it is our goal to be the leading institution in poultry research, education and outreach in the United States, if not the world,” according to College of Agriculture Dean Paul Patterson.
• As UW focuses on clean energy research, new center set to draw industry partners. In its basic physical structure, the 340,000 square-foot Center for Advanced Materials and Clean Energy Technologies (CAMCET) at the University of Washington will be similar to many research facilities on campuses across the country. It will have areas for research and testing, for education, and for office space. But there will be one key difference.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the May 2019 issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar video, Metrics and Benchmarking for University Corporate Engagement: Breaking Down Silos to Gauge Performance.

University-Industry Engagement Advisor
Vol. 1, No. 5, May 2019

• Special focus: Creating successful engagement events. Hosting events is a big part of successful industry engagement, providing a crucial source of introductions, outreach, education, and relationship-building. This issue’s  first four articles are focused on this task, including coverage of “Industry Day” events, a best practice program from Sweden’s Uppsala University, a partner recognition program at UMass Lowell, and a “reverse pitch” program from Carnegie Mellon.
  • Key strategies for hosting a successful ‘Industry Day’ on campus. “Industry Days,” or day-long events held to showcase what a university has to offer to one or more industry partners, can be an effective way for a university to “put its best foot forward.”
  • Uppsala “AIMday” industry event has long, successful track record. While some universities are now just starting to think about sponsoring industry days, Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden, has been presenting an academia-industry initiative for more than a decade.
  • UMass Lowell gives a big “thank you” to industry partners. No doubt universities greatly appreciate the support they receive from their industry partners — not only for their financial contributions, but also for the other support they provide in terms of collaboration. But how many of them actually take the time to say “thank you?”
  • CMU reverse pitch challenge ‘flips the table’ on corporate engagement. University-based start-up companies and similar entities seeking corporate sponsorships or partnerships are exhaustingly familiar with the process of developing and presenting elevator pitches. But what if the process was reversed?
• New one-stop engagement center makes navigation of PSU easier for industry. In an effort to increase and expand the number of multi-faceted corporate relationships it has, Penn State University has opened the Penn State Corporate Engagement Center.
• New ‘city’ on Purdue campus seen as major draw for industry, start-ups. Universities looking to draw companies and start-ups to their regions may be overlooking a government tax incentive program that, coupled with the perks and talent pipeline available on campus, can become a strong economic development and industry engagement magnet.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the April 2019 issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar video, Metrics and Benchmarking for University Corporate Engagement: Breaking Down Silos to Gauge Performance.

University-Industry Engagement Advisor
Vol. 1, No. 4, April 2019

• Automatic licensing in industry-sponsored research: Does it pay off? “The jury is still out” on automatic (pre-negotiated) licensing in industry-sponsored research, said a trio of attorneys who comprised the panel for a session entitled “Automatic Licensing Initiatives: How they work and how they are working,” at the recent AUTM 2019 conference in Austin, TX.
• ACTA model streamlines contracting for sponsored multi-center clinical trials. The search for model agreements to reduce the often tedious and lengthy period of negotiations necessary to finalize university-industry contracts is an ongoing battle, with efforts extending to many different types of projects and partners. It now seems that in at least one specific area — industry-sponsored multi-center clinical trials — a viable solution has been found.
• Tulane, LSU Health join forces in their efforts to garner more industry partnerships. The sum of the whole, they say, is often greater than its parts. That premise is clearly behind the partnership that has developed between Tulane University and LSU Health as they seek to broaden their collaborations with industry. Their success in working together to meet the needs of industry could serve as a strong hint to schools who share a geographical location, but who don’t yet combine their efforts in industry engagement.
• Pitt’s focused collaboration expands into wide range of partner engagements. It began as cleanly and simply as many partnerships do: Two entities realized they each had something the other needed, and readily agreed to a partnership based on meeting those needs. But what a difference a few years can make; today, that partnership has branched into areas perhaps neither had imagined.
• George Mason’s ‘GovCon’ center targets massive federal contracting market. The new Center for Government Contracting at the George Mason University School of Business has the goal of bringing together industry and government contracting in an academic setting to focus on research, education and training, and collaboration.
• Clemson, GE forge deeper engagement built on 20 years of collaboration. The latest headlines from Clemson, SC, crow about a new investment by GE Power at its Advanced Manufacturing Works (AMW) in Greenville, SC, including the installment of three 3D printing machines, intended for the use of Clemson University students as they work side by side with GE engineers at the newly established Advanced Manufacturing Lab. Impressive as that investment is, however, it is just the latest step in a deep relationship that has developed between these partners over a period of more than 20 years.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the March 2019 issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar video, Metrics and Benchmarking for University Corporate Engagement: Breaking Down Silos to Gauge Performance.

University-Industry Engagement Advisor
Vol. 1, No. 3, March 2019

• Controversial partners put industry engagement managers in tough spot. The controversy involving the Chinese firm Huawei and the possibility of IP theft has filled the headlines, and with the media coverage has come stories of the tech company’s university partners ceasing, or at least questioning, ongoing research collaborations.
• U of Indy and Roche partner on “academy” to train future employees. Many companies collaborate with universities to help develop a talent pipeline, but Roche Diagnostics and the University of Indianapolis have created a much more formal structure: The “Roche Academy” trains a select group of students with the specific goal of having them join Roche after graduation.
• Universities creating large-scale ‘research Meccas’ to attract more industry. Impressive development projects and equally lofty goals are typical of the innovation centers and districts a number of universities are pouring money into as a way to create magnets — they hope — for a greater influx of industry partners to their campuses.
• University, industry find mutual benefits through business advising programs. “University-based advising can be the cornerstone of a strong university-industry partnership that increases innovation and improves new employee readiness,” says UIDP in its publication “University Business Advising.” You certainly won’t get any argument from John B. Jackson, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship, Small Business Institute, and CSUF (California State University, Fullerton) Startup Incubator. In fact, UIDP cited Jackson’s program and its 100 client projects per year as an example of a strong business advising program.
• GA State partners with law firm to provide insights into legal analytics. It must be challenging these days for law firms interested in getting up to speed in the rapidly evolving world of legal analytics. Not only is determining how to best employ legal analytics a challenging task, it can be an expensive proposition as well — and it could create a new market for university engagement professionals.
• Mcity casts wide net for partners in pre-competitive autonomous vehicle research. Picture a public/private partnership focused on connected and automated vehicles that involves a major research university, leading automobile manufacturing companies, automobile supply companies, insurance firms, telecommunications and infrastructure companies, the DoD and local government, and you may come close to describing Mcity.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the February 2019 issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar video, Metrics and Benchmarking for University Corporate Engagement: Breaking Down Silos to Gauge Performance.

University-Industry Engagement Advisor
Vol. 1, No. 2, February 2019

• For those who’ve done it, co-location is a winning partnership strategy. Co-location is a growing trend in university-industry collaboration, but to make it work most effectively is more challenging than simply putting people together in a shared space, and those who’ve done it offered their models, strategies, and lessons learned in a series of interviews with UIEA.
• Fee-for-service options provide another avenue for industry engagement. In an ideal world, offering industry the opportunity to explore initial or limited exposure to the resources available at a university on a fee-for-service basis will ultimately lead to a deeper, more long-term relationship, but in some cases that just doesn’t happen.
• Innovation voucher program provides financial support for industry partnerships. The University of Rhode Island Business Engagement Center, or BEC, has clearly impacted the development of university-industry collaborations in the state in a positive way. Established about five years ago, the “one-stop-shop” for Rhode Island companies, which BEC says it modeled after the engagement center at the University of Michigan, has hosted over 800 corporate campus visits and encouraged 220-plus corporations to support its programs.
• Princeton puts industry at the heart of its efforts to strengthen ecosystem. There’s much talk and activity related to building innovation ecosystems, but there’s no real road map for getting the job done. One thing that everyone can agree on, however: it’s a big, complex, and difficult job.
• Connecting students with industry is the driving goal of specialized program. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Supply Chain Management Institute (SCMI) is, as its name implies, focused on a very specific area of business. And since 2010, SCMI’s “raison d’etre” has been to create and expand new ways for supply chain management students to interact with industry.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the January 2019 issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar collection, Best Practices in Forming and Managing Industry-University Partnerships.

University-Industry Engagement Advisor
Vol. 1, No. 1, January 2019

• Universities key to successful pitch for Amazon HQ2. Few economic development efforts in recent years (if any) have captured as much national attention as the competition to win approval from Amazon for its HQ2 location. The successful efforts of Northern Virginia, one of 238 applicants, were led by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP), and one might have assumed that, like its co-winner in New York, tax incentives were one of the keys to it success.
• University-industry effort helps fill training gap among grad students. An extensive joint program between The Graduate School of NC State and several of its corporate partners is providing targeted programming for graduate students seeking a career in industry.
• Don’t let details of visiting scientist agreements get lost in the shuffle. While leading an interactive discussion on visiting scientist agreements at the recent UIDP27 meeting in Chicago, Carolyn M. Brougham, JD, senior contracts officer in the Office for Sponsored Research at Northwestern University, noted that “the big question we dealt with is how the ‘sausage’ is made, and who quarterbacks for the university?”
• UCF and its students thrive with aerospace industry partnerships. In real estate, they say the three most important factors are “location, location, location,” and that certainly can’t hurt a university interested in seeing as many of its graduates as possible hired by leading companies in desirable fields.
• New web portal at U Saskatchewan offers one-stop-shop for industry. Few university outreach efforts warm the hearts of industry as much as the question, “How can we better serve you?”
• Scotland weaves together ‘triple helix’ of partners to enhance life science ecosystem. A new “simple guide” to health sciences in Scotland was initiated by an organization representing different areas of the spectrum.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the December 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar collection, Best Practices in Forming and Managing Industry-University Partnerships.

If you would like a free sample issue, click here.

Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 12, December 2018

• Cornell creates new industry-friendly contract options to attract more partnerships. While an enthusiastic approach to forming partnerships with industry is a good start for a university seeking to expand in the area of corporate-sponsored research, the leaders of Cornell University’s efforts recognized that an “open for business” attitude was just that: a start.
• Starbucks and ASU partner to offer free tuition to thousands. In what is definitely a unique approach to university-industry partnerships, Starbucks and Arizona State University have worked together since 2014 on the Starbucks College Achievement Plan (SCAP), a program designed to provide the opportunity for Starbucks’ partners (employees) to attend and graduate college that they otherwise likely would not have had.
• UW restructures units, adds staff to strengthen outreach to industry. Has UW-Madison been faltering in its efforts to engender partnerships with industry? A recent article in the publication Isthmus posed the following question: “Why does the world-class research institution struggle to work with industry?”
• Open new partnership opportunities by helping tech scouts see the bigger picture. Optimizing relationships with corporate technology scouts is not a one-size-fits-all proposition, but it can include both narrowing and expanding their focus, depending on their company’s needs and their awareness of the university’s capabilities.
• New agreement enables CSL Behring to choose from 21 potential university partners. As a company involved in therapeutics, diagnostics, or medical devices, would you prefer to pursue collaborations one university at a time, or link up with a source that can offer you your pick of proposals from as many as 21 universities?
• Researchers take road trip to get face time with potential industry partners. For universities in rural or off-the-beaten-path locations, getting face-to-face with potential industry research partners is no simple task. But Michigan Technological University (MTU), a 7,000-student school in Houghton, is getting some of that face time by sending its researchers on a road trip.
• Cranfield’s research deal with Severn Trent recognized as ‘Top 100’ partnership. What lands an academic-industry partnership among the “Top 100” global corporate-academic partnerships, according to the Nature Index?

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the November 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar collection, Best Practices in Forming and Managing Industry-University Partnerships.

If you would like a free sample issue, click here.

Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 11, November 2018

• Brown U develops new model for ‘scalable’ industry engagement. An industry-university relationship — like a human to human relationship — is ideally something that runs deep and lasts a long time. So, the best way to build a good industry-university relationship may be to model that relationship on human relationships. Start small, get to know each other, and then gradually scale-up to the ideal relationship. The Office of Industry Engagement & Commercial Venturing at Brown University is building a model for industry engagement using this scale-up concept.
• BASF shares key elements of success in multi-institutional collaborations. BASF has a long history of collaborations with academia around the globe, but its research deals in the U.S. have been relatively far and few between despite a surfeit of leading chemistry research institutions. To address this gap, BASF executives with personal ties to Harvard professors started a dialogue that laid the foundation for the company’s multidisciplinary, strategic collaborations with American universities.
• How to make the most of campus visits from corporate partners. At the recent UIDP 27 gathering in Chicago, Sacha Patera, PhD, senior managing director for corporation relationships at Dartmouth College, led a discussion about how to maximize the outcomes of in-person visits between university and corporate partners. Patera represented a group which will ultimately publish a guide on these best practices for UIDP, but as she and the other members of the group ISRM interviewed noted, their comments for this article are not an “official” stance, but rather their individual thoughts on how to optimize these visits, flavored of course with the feedback each of them have shared to date.
• Humana, U Houston partner on new med school in bid to boost population health. It may not be all that unique for a medical school and a corporation to collaborate, but this one’s a little different; you see, this medical school has not even opened yet (the inaugural class will begin study in the fall of 2020).
• With industry help, UConn creates state-of-the-art park for collaborative research. When universities and industry enter into research collaborations, the partnerships may typically involve a single researcher or research team, with the research taking place at the lab where the project got its beginnings. But the University of Connecticut is thinking much, much bigger than that.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the October 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar collection, Best Practices in Forming and Managing Industry-University Partnerships.

If you would like a free sample issue, click here.

Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 10, October 2018

• GEDI: A powerful connector to industry engagement opportunities at U Waterloo. When Canada’s leading university in innovation launched a new program called the “Global Entrepreneurship and Disruptive Innovation initiative,” the name itself seemed, well, short on innovation. So, they nicknamed it GEDI (pronounced Jedi). “Obviously, Star Wars is a big favorite of a lot of people,” said Rob Esselment, associate vice-president for government relations at the University of Waterloo. The name stuck and is now the commonly used name of the initiative.
• Partnership Canvas provides systematic approach to industry collaborations. How appropriate that the partners in the development of a new tool “to systematically assess and develop different aspects of a strategic partnership” each represent one side of the university-industry “equation.”
• New VA Tech Center for Industry Partnerships is off to a strong start. If you’re an organization designed to streamline and strengthen processes for corporate partnerships that’s less than a year old and you’ve already helped secure multi-million-dollar agreements with companies like Boeing and digital currency pioneer Block.one, you’ve got to be on the right track. Add to that a partnership with Mahindra Group, which has announced it will sponsor research in agricultural robotics, and Virginia Tech’s “LINK, the Center for Industry Partnerships” is clearly off to a strong start.
• Nailing down collaboration details critical for long-term partnership program. When a university has a half-century of experience in collaborating with large, brand-name companies like Volvo, Ericsson, Saab, and ABB, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to develop best practices for university-industry engagement. Such is the case with Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
• Silo-busting holistic approach to engagement brings big results at U of Minnesota. Breaking down silos and barriers is a key component to facilitating successful corporate engagement with universities. The holistic approach — integrating efforts between departments and placing the industry partner’s needs at the center — has been put into practice at the University of Minnesota.
• UC-Santa Cruz forges industry links with corporate-sponsored senior projects. While many companies sponsor graduate level research projects, it is far less common for undergraduates to get opportunities to solve real-world engineering problems in industry. Through the Baskin School of Engineering’s Corporate Sponsored Senior Project Program (CSSPP), the University of California at Santa Cruz is connecting college seniors and companies with an eye towards not only solving problems and creating innovative products, but also positioning students for employment after graduation.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the September 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar collection, Best Practices in Forming and Managing Industry-University Partnerships.

If you would like a free sample issue, click here.

Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 9, September 2018

• Corporate tiering strategies allow schools to focus engagement resources. There are just too many corporations out there for university departments charged with forming partnerships to cover them all — especially with limited resources. Many leaders agree that corporate tiering — a strategy for prioritizing companies that should be primary targets — is an extremely effective way to sharpen your focus.
• New IP policy at Missouri S&T leads to increase in industry research. As many universities have discovered in the last 10 years, companies are getting more sophisticated — and demanding — about intellectual property (IP) when crafting research partnerships with universities. Like many schools, at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (S&T), the long held policy was that companies sponsored the research, the university owned the IP, and then the university licensed it back to the sponsor. But a policy change in 2013 added another new option.
• Take a structured approach to recruiting alumni as corporate ‘liaisons.’ “The answer to anything when I’m meeting with corporations is ‘Yes, I can help you with that,’ said Eileen Murphy, PhD, senior director of corporate and foundation relations with Rutgers University Foundation, speaking to an audience of NACRO members at their annual meeting in July. And if the question is ‘can universities engage alumni in industry engagement,’ the answer is an even more resounding ‘yes.’
• UC-Irvine, diagnostics firm form “unique” relationship in new collaboration. Press releases about new and different discoveries or strategies often contain the word “unique,” and those accustomed to reading them learn to take the claim with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, representatives of the University of California-Irvine and Beckman Coulter Diagnostics, Inc., make a good case that the relationship they have established is distinctly different from other corporate/university collaborations.
• NJ launches one-stop web portal to showcase research, attract industry partners. The home to some of the nation’s best-known research universities, the state of New Jersey recently launched a collaborative web portal showcasing its faculty and their innovations in a bid to attract more industry partnerships and create new momentum for research-driven economic development in the state.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the August 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar collection, Best Practices in Forming and Managing Industry-University Partnerships.

If you would like a free sample issue, click here.

Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 8, August 2018

• How Ohio State centralizes information for corporate engagement. Many companies want a single point of contact at for their university partnering. For universities to be able to accommodate them, however, they need to gather information from all corporate-facing units — including separate schools, offices of sponsored research, tech transfer, foundations, and career services — and be able to present it to companies as a clear and comprehensive view of engagement activities.
• Universities, corporations both reap the benefits of diversity programs. Why are diversity programs so important to both universities and corporations? Beyond the social justice considerations for espousing diverse student and faculty populations, both see a benefit to society and, specifically, to business.
• Stanford’s faculty guide helps prepare researchers to work with industry. In what could be described as a best practice in educating and preparing faculty for industry-sponsored research arrangements, the Industrial Contracts Office (ICO) at Stanford University offers a slick, well-organized and comprehensive overview of corporate research partnerships.
• Universities, businesses forming “super region” with Capital Co-LAB collaborative. In January 2018, nine university presidents from Washington DC, Baltimore, and Richmond, VA, attended a meeting with CEOs from the area’s leading companies. The nine had never all been together in the same room before, and some of them had never even met. But the meeting that ensued resulted in a university-business alliance — the Capital Co-LAB — that is working towards building an economic powerhouse in a previously economically and politically fragmented geographic area.