Academic-Industry Collaborations#

Prerequisites#

Prerequisites

Importance

Skill Level

Notes

Project Design

Helpful

Beginner

This guide has lots of useful information that would be helpful to consider when starting a collaboration

Community Managers: Overview

Helpful

Beginner

An overview of the Community Manager Role

Guide to Planning a Community

Helpful

Beginner

The Guide to Planning a Community are helpful context for the Community Building Subchapter in this section
Scriberia illustration showing the collaboration between academia and industry. On the left hand side is an academic middle-aged man in a suit sitting at a desk with certificates on the wall and a 'world's best prof' mug. On the right hand side is a young professional woman, standing up on the phone with a fancy computer in front of her and sleek looking buildings behind her. Beneath those two panels are the academic man and the industry woman having a conversation- behind them are speech bubbles, a globe and the text 'real-world impact'

Fig. 111 Academic-Industry Partnership The Turing Way project illustration by Scriberia. Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. Original version on Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8169292#

Summary#

Academic-Industry collaborations can take many forms, but put simply they are when an academic institution or university collaborates with a corporation or business such as a pharmaceutical company, a consulting firm or a technology company.

Whilst academia and industry are often viewed with having differing cultures, research aims and ways of working, there can be many advantages of bridging this perceived gap and working collaboratively.

Some of these advantages include:

  • Access to and leveraging resources on both sides, such as funding, research expertise and skills and real-world data

  • Combining foundational research (often the academic focus) and applied research (often the industry focus)

  • Accelerating innovation and societal impact through working together on a shared research problem

  • Experience and increased career opportunities for students and researchers working as part of the collaboration

Motivation and Background#

Academic-Industry collaborations are becoming more popular, with the number of them more than doubling between 2012 and 2016.

We wanted to create a chapter as a starting point for those looking to set up an academic-industry collaboration, however a lot of the chapter content can be applied to any collaboration. Similarly, a lot of existing content in The Turing Way also applies and we have signposted to this throughout. Many academic-industry collaborations are very similar in nature to academic research projects, with some small nuances that we have tried to capture. Overall we hope the chapter will give insights into how to set up for success in practice for a partnership between academia and industry, through navigating expectations, ways of working and bringing in elements such as community building.

The basis of the following subchapters are mainly from the experience of the Turing-Roche partnership. We would welcome any further input and content from other academic-industry collaborations.

In this chapter we are using the terms ‘collaboration’ and ‘partnership’ interchangeably but understand these may confer different meanings depending on the context.