The chairman of the Technology Strategy Board is optimistic about bridging the gap between academia and industry.

Phil Smith, chairman of the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), discussed research commercialisation at an event organised by publisher Elsevier. Apart from being chair at TSB, the UK’s innovation agency, he is also chief executive of Cisco UK and Ireland.

Smith sees efforts to bridge the so-called Valley of Death paying off, as universities are becoming increasingly savvier at collaborating with industry. This has been especially true since the latest trebling of tuition fees, which has raised annual tuition fees to £9,000 ($15,100). The trebling has meant that students are putting more and more pressure on universities to provide commercial skills, as they are increasingly concerned about what their money is paying for.

On the other hand, industry is increasingly turning to universities for ideas and talent. Cisco itself has recognised these opportunities, and is running the British Innovation Gateway. It is a UK-wide series of initiatives and partnerships which provides mentoring and funding to entrepreneurs and startups.

Smith also acknowledges the web and digitisation as key reasons for the collaboration, as they are doing away with the issues surrounding physical distance. The internet’s open nature shows a potential solution to the problem of the two sectors’ differing attitudes to transparency of research, data and intellectual property. Open innovation has proven to be powerful for both academia and industry.

However, he also voiced some concern with the industry’s attitude: “It is not really very fair for businesses to look at schools and universities and say, “why are you not delivering the right skills to me?”, if businesses are not willing to get involved, have their people seconded in, maybe going and mentoring people while they are on the course, running courses to talk to them about the kind of skills they want, maybe giving them practical training. I mean a lot of us have that inside our own companies, those kind of training courses, why would we not allow students to use them so that when they came they already had some of those skills?”