To my opinion the gap between academic research and industry presently keeps on widening mainly due to the ever increasing pressure for publications in academic groups and to the recent tendency of cutting back on direct industrial fundings or contacts to these groups. Obvious signs for this are, that publications are getting diluted and nowadays industrials hardly attend academic meetings and vice versa. If this gap further increases it can be a vicious circle damaging the capability of both sides. Do you experience the same in your field and country? Do you have any idea how this divergence could be managed and stopped?
It is an excellent question. Acidemias have talents, whereas industrial labs have money. It is a marriage of a beautiful and a rich one. The children - technologies, products, and solutions should bring benefits (through Governments' policies and regulations for a fair distribution of benefits) to each party of this transaction.
Academies should be a special case of being a Government entity while having a partial permit to act as a free enterprise. Industrial labs should be permitted to sub-contract academic institutions for projects important for the country.
In Denmark the trend has been towards more cooperation in the last decade.
We have seen a change in part of the research council funding into cooperative funding. The state ministeriers also have different funding programs in energy, environmental technology and food technology there university researchers can get funding for projects in cooperation with companies being dependent on that the company does research into new technology and solutions and then the universities will get matching funding to do research on the more academic parts of the project.
Dear Len Leonid,
Thank you for the nice metaphor. I absolutely agree with you that governments should put much more efforts into saving this good old marriage. Nowadays in our uni-sex world, not so nice or ugly children are born only from the rich (from industrial co-operations) because the beautiful (academia) is too beautiful and not fertile anymore. I think you are right that making academies a free enterprise (a competitive beautiful and rich) would be a right step forward. When industry sees an obvious supremacy and potential economic competition from academia it won't hesitate with sub-contracts if they want to survive. When a state has influence or share in the company, the government control is obviously also easier for the rich side.
Best regards,
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