RISKS AND REWARDS OF CORPORATE/COLLEGE PARTNERSHIPS

English abstract written from the article Ósmosis Tecnológica en la Torre de Marfil, published in June, 2007 in Universía Business Review

This paper, written by Beatriz Junquera Cimadevilla, Jesús Angel del Brio González and Esteban Fernández Sánchez, all of the University of Oviedo in Spain, discusses the advantages and disadvantages inherent in corporate/college partnerships for both sides. Specifically, the article focuses on existing structures in universities and business that are integral to the successful development of these relationships.

Advantages for the University

Advantages for the university are numerous in these partnerships, since it is their mission to investigate and disseminate knowledge. Often, the university has been accused of closing itself in an ivory tower, removed from the reality of business. Active relationships with corporate partners serve to improve the ability of an academic institution to help solve business problems, and will enrich the knowledge of the professors by putting them in situations where they are forced to address practical problems with scientific knowledge.

Colleges are tasked with contributing to the economic growth of their supported region, while improving the level of teaching and investigation. As a result, there is a strong need to obtain practical teaching knowledge, and the relationships between businesses and universities aid the professors by offering practical knowledge that can be applied to educational activities as examples and case studies. Testing theories through application and contact with business realities creates an environment for learning that far exceeds the laboratory setting.

Other benefits for the university from this partnership include:

• Supplemental assets for investigation and knowledge transfer: Business contacts provide academic institutions with resources to equip their laboratories and acquire valuable material for investigation, the costs of which are covered by the partner business.
• Alignment with entrepreneurial activity in the university: University investigators are able to come closer to entrepreneurial activity at multiple stages of development in the business world, which allows for comparison points to evaluate, learn from and contribute to the process.
• Job creation for students: Professors that participate in corporate partnerships are instrumental in basic recruitment, which benefits both the company and the university as graduates are recruited for high-level positions.

Advantages for the Corporation

The advantages for companies are equally compelling, since partnering with a college can help to spread or reduce the costs of investigative activity by leveraging publicly funded facilities, workers, and teams of professors. In particular, the access to specialized scientific knowledge and the most cutting edge theories and data in a specific field can be especially valuable to help stimulate more creative technological development.

Some key benefits for the corporate partner are:

• Classroom testing of the newest technologies: Producers of cutting edge equipment donate resources to universities to create brand loyalty. The access to this equipment and staff trained in its use is a direct benefit to partner corporations.
• Authority of tests: With an unbiased approach, academic research inspires a higher level of confidence than other investigative forms. The introduction of an academic into the process therefore improves the accuracy and reliability of the research, in addition to perceptions of credibility.
• Recruiting: Partnerships permit companies to observe students first hand and identify the top performers as candidates for building a motivated and high performing workforce.
• Improving public image and credibility: Cooperation with universities permits companies to reduce time to market, which improves the image of the company by providing greater and more frequent social benefit to consumers through their products.

Disadvantages and Risks for Misalignment

There are also negative factors that must be addressed when corporations and universities collaborate, and many of these arise from incompatibility between cultures and communication styles. For example, university researchers fear that the infusion of finance and donations by companies might constrict their academic freedom and diminish the legitimacy of their research. At the same time, bureaucratic occurrences within the university can impair the project timeline from the perspective of business leaders.

Additionally, corporations are more accustomed to cross-disciplinary collaboration than universities, and as a result there may be training and orientation time required to fully ramp-up an effective partnership. Researchers also have a tendency to believe that their work is at a higher level than what is required to solve a corporate problem; while corporations may believe that the theoretical work of the university has no basis in reality.

Other potential problems may arise due conflicting goals and values, such as:

• Diversity of objectives: The primary goal of researchers is to publish articles in journals of the highest prestige, making their work public, while companies regard many of their most beneficial developments as trade secrets and refuse to share their conclusions.
• Incompatible agendas: Researchers have other responsibilities that supercede consulting engagements such as teaching, research, tutoring, and other university obligations. These priorities take precedence in the eyes of the administration and therefore corporate partnerships are pushed aside.
• Increased cost of coordination: Cooperation with universities affects the workflow of a company, elevating costs due to coordination.

Identifying Opportunities for Support

When structuring corporate college partnerships it is also important to have an understanding of the key organizational components required by each party, and also the groups or departments that may be in place to facilitate such relationships.

Supportive University Structures

Key university structures for partnerships often include technology transfer offices that are intended to create synergy between academics, capitalists, consultants and directors by improving the flow of potentially complex communications. These offices also provide a support structure for teaching the business creation process to all parties and offering legal protection, licensing, and royalty services.

These organizations are sometimes augmented by technological institutes that have the principal goal of eliminating the bureaucracy and chaos created when dealing across departments. By facilitating this coordination, the full expertise of both organizations can be leveraged to support the end goal through collaboration.

Incubator organizations are also supported by universities, and will provide access to many important creative outlets that encourage innovation such as access to capital, business networks and tools. This support decreases the likelihood of the failure of a venture by 2.2 times (Linder, 2003).

Supportive Business Structures

Key business components for successful partnerships include sponsorship by a senior executive who supports the initiative, assures that the relationship will continue to prosper, and can identify other potential contributors across departments to bring into the project. Through coordination and clarification of needs and objectives with the director of relations of the university, the projects remain focused and the relationship improves for future initiatives.

This activity will often be supported by a company-employed director of academic relations who acts as the interface with the university. The director of academic relations engages senior management to participate in projects, while coordinating and communicating the goals and objectives both internally and with the partner university. In some cases there will also be a director of campus recruitment employed in order to create a presence on the partner campus for the company to identify and recruit top talent.

Conclusion

There is an incredible potential for growth and development in partnerships between universities and private business. Both sides benefit from strengthening their ability to discover and disseminate knowledge, and apply academic and innovative theory to real world problems. However, these relationships are often delicate due to conflicts of interest and differences in organizational values, culture and communication styles. By duplicating structures and processes that have been proven by successful partnerships elsewhere, highly beneficial outcomes will result for both sides.