Almost 5 bad years (including Covid and a war) have past since I raised a question whether the gap between academic research and industry is widening. To my opinion the process continued in the meantime and the gap became rather a deep abyss at least here in Europe and in research on homogeneous catalysis. In reality, academy is still sponsored by industry in most of the countries but only at state level. Nowadays, it is hard to find direct industrial projects given to academic groups. What is even more evident that industry is seemingly not sponsoring academic scientific events and industrials are also completely absent from such meetings contrary to the 90's, for example. Furthermore, industrial findings and patents are generally neglected in recent academic research. It came so far that academic journals sponsor academic meetings and partly also the publications. Thus, it seems like research is sponsored, which ends up in itself. Also the funding, which comes from the state is controlled by the academy and publications are accepted mainly from these grants.
The ever increasing pressure for publications in academic groups only worsens the situation resulting in massal diversion from the reality, i.e. from the really important industrial and current research challenges. No wonder then that industrials are absent from recent scientific meetings.
One of the primary goal of academia to provide industry with researchers, who are capable of doing their own research and outfindings. Why to exclude them from science? For example, by creating academic degrees and other arguments for levels and titles, etc. why industrials are not qualified for this? Why not to have a healthy balance in this, like in the 90's or before to see the light at the end of the tunnel?
There is a lot of scientific research being done in government labs or in industrial labs, so I would not say it is only academic research that counts. But private industry is focused on making investments that will pay off for the company so industrial research tends to be focused on short term or long term products or industries.
I actually think there is much more interaction between industry and academic researchers than there was in the 90s. It may depend on the field but the cross fertilization there days is quite robust.
Dear Michael,
I agree with you that there is a lot of research being done in industry. Part of the problem that academic researchers are not quite aware on what. In addition, I am not so sure that industrial research is still considered scientific by academic terms. You are also right that this might depend on the field of chemistry and the region of the world. My field is homogeneous catalysis and I am residing in Europe. So I must restrict my observations to this. Yet after being 20 years or more in each of these sides, I can still clearly see that the cooperation between academy and industry continuously worsening here back from the 60's. As I wrote earlier a visible proof for this that industrials are no longer attending academic meetings and industrial research is not cited in academic works. To my opinion it is not a good direction when instead of partial but direct sponsorship from industry only academic publishers and eventually the state sponsors academic meetings, projects and publications.
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