A detailed article on Semiconductor Research Corporation’s migration to the Pillar Science matchmaking and stewardship platform for building and managing corporate partnerships appears in the April issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor. For subscription information, click here.
When the Semiconductor Research Corporation started migrating 40 years of data from its custom-built management software to an off-the-shelf platform a couple of years ago, they knew there would be some growing pains. It took over a year as they worked through those glitches, finding the gaps, filling them, and tailoring the new system to meet its needs before going live in December 2022.
SRC, a global consortium of tech companies, government agencies, and universities centered around solving the biggest problems in the semiconductor industry, wanted to make it easier to figure out what its industry partners were looking for and match them with the PIs who could help power their research priorities.
To do that, after decades of building and operating its own systems, SRC turned to AI-enhanced Pillar Science, the Canada-based university-industry matchmaking and stewardship platform co-founded by Karim Bouayad-Gervais, PhD. And it didn’t take long to find out that switching to the new system, which uses a proprietary AI matchmaking algorithm and a massive scrape of public data, was the right decision. Within the first year, according to results published in a case study by Pillar, SRC’s new academic-industry collaborations surged by 64%.
Jennifer Q. Dickens, communications manager with SRC, was part of the team that helped make the transition to Pillar possible. Having experienced what was there before and what’s now in place, she makes an apt analogy.
“The previous platform was like a card catalog in a quiet library where you could come in and look at the data,” she says. “But with our experience with Pillar, it’s more like being in an interactive museum where you can communicate, touch, and interact. Connections are definitely the most important piece of what we’re seeing today. Moving to an off-the-shelf piece of software was a radical departure for us. And it was really exciting to find a product that actually fit the bill.”
Why did SRC’s industry engagement efforts take a hard, upward trajectory after switching to the new tool? Perhaps most importantly, it’s the scale of the platform. Pillar — across its entire platform, not just its account with SRC — has over 33,000 users on four continents with over $2 billion in sponsored research projects. The system requires no data input from the university.
When users log on, companies can find PDF-style profiles of relevant scientists and the professors and students associated with them. On the other side of the coin, academics, after a simple search, can find company liaisons aligned with their areas of research. With Pillar’s AI-fortified search functions, both sides of the contact lists have already been narrowed down to what’s possible, negating the laborious process of looking for, and finding, people who are not interested in doing business with you.
“If you go fishing, you are hoping to catch the big fish,” says Bouayad-Gervais. “But the big fish needs to want you as well. It’s a two-sided relationship, and we take that into account in our matchmaking.”
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