Can we bust the myths of university-business relations?

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has prioritised university-business links for more than 15 years. The assumption of many has been that universities and businesses would evolve into a relationship of seamless interaction where many bugbears – like negotiations on intellectual Property (IP) or bureaucracy – would be a thing of the past.  However, as the agenda matures, it seems likely that the reality will always be more complex.

Bureaucracy doesn’t go away

Dame Ann Dowling is presently in the process of conducting a review of relationships between industry and university researchers. Issues like IP handling seem to have been prominent in evidence to the review, particularly from industry and sometimes from academic entrepreneurs.

Helpfully, the university professional bodies who deal with business – AURIL and Praxisunico – recently published a valuable briefing note on technology transfer (the process of protecting and commercialising IP). The briefing note was prepared by a small group of technology transfer offices (TTOs) led by Dr Tony Raven CEO of Cambridge Enterprise.

The briefing note highlights that bureaucracy doesn’t go away for universities, and indeed may increase, sometimes for unpredictable reasons.

As an example, universities are publicly funded and so subject to the European Commission’s (EC) state aids regulations. In many ways helpfully, the EC has sought to encourage universities to become more active in working with business, with regulations set up to help this (for example, through exemptions to state aids for some research or innovation activities).

Also the EC has sought to reduce burden by devolving approval and monitoring processes more to member states. New approaches may give more flexibility to university-industry working, but these go with new reporting requirements that both HEFCE and universities need to get to grips with.

Charity Commission regulations (where HEFCE acts as the principal regulator) are another source of complexity. Essentially, extracting commercial value from publicly funded charities appropriately is not a trivial issue, even when it is highly beneficial as delivering public goods like growth, innovation and productivity gains.

The public good

But there are also matters of deep principle, and not just of red tape, which inform university approaches to IP.

Universities benefit from public money and reductions in tax from their charitable status, and all these are premised around the university acting for the broad public good. This may include working with the private sector, but this must be in a thoughtful way that balances various public interests and long-term goods.

Universities are also intrinsically collaborative organisations and research is an activity of many participants.

The note expresses well the challenge for the technology transfer professional:

‘Ultimately the TTO is responsible to the senior governing body of the university it represents, but many of the beneficiaries it is representing are not’.

Beneficiaries include other researchers, departments, students, research funders and the like – as well as the country, its people and places, in terms of economic development.

There is also competition as universities and academics seek research funding, as well as opportunities for entrepreneurship and mutually beneficial industry partnerships.

A challenge for any university is how to use its resources effectively and fairly in relation to the many opportunities it has to develop its research, teaching and knowledge exploitation, across many different disciplines.

Practical solutions

All this complexity does not stop great things happening – the recent announcement by Oxford University that it has raised £300 million to invest in its spin-out companies, working with Oxford Sciences Innovation plc and the local Oxford cluster, is one example.

However, we need to engage with practical solutions to handle bureaucracy, recognising that it is inevitable and something that is not invented by universities, but is intrinsic to the legal and regulatory framework around their operations.

One avenue may be to encourage greater use of the Lambert toolkit that was developed in 2003 and is currently being reviewed by the UK Intellectual Property Office.

There are differences of view on whether standard agreements are a useful tool to handle bureaucracy and cope with the flexibility needed in negotiations. However, the materials behind agreements such as guidance notes are invaluable to ensure universities and businesses start negotiations in a position of mutual understanding on each other’s policies and principles.

We also need inventive approaches in universities to ‘hide the wiring’ to academic entrepreneurs and industry partners. A forthcoming evaluation of HEIF from PACEC consultants, due to be published in summer this year, summarises some of the ideas universities are already exploring to bust bureaucracy.

This includes putting in place technical experts such as technology transfer professionals and many other types of specialists, managing small and specialised teams better, and bringing in more people with commercial backgrounds.

This comment first appeared on HEFCE’s blog.