Recently, a colleague of mine from industry expressed some of the challenges she faced when reaching out to a university seeking collaboration, a proposed collaboration that she was able to fund. In spite of doing her homework and offering funding, her efforts generated little interest. Meanwhile, I have been struggling for years to improve the level of industry participation in my academic unit, even though leadership, faculty, staff, and students all want it. (An “academic unit” is typically a department, school, or college within a university.)

Why are academic/industry collaborations so difficult to launch?

I begin by noting that most universities do have diverse and meaningful collaborations with industry, so the problem is not at all intractable. But these collaborations do take some work, and in this post I’d like to elucidate some of what makes it challenging and provide some practical advice to help those who want to make them happen. I begin with some of the challenges.

Challenge: Location, Location, Location!

Many major American research universities are located in small towns dotted across the country: Lincoln, NE; Madison, WI; Ann Arbor, MI; West Lafayette, IN; Ames, IA; Lexington, KY; Charlottesville, VA; State College, PA, and so on. For major companies in Silicon Valley, Seattle, and New York, it can take an entire day each way simply to get to these locations; universities (such as Stanford or University of Washington) in or near the latter locations have a key geographic advantage. For those of us situated in remote small towns, our first challenge is geographic.

Challenge: Opaque Organizational Structure

The next challenge is cultural. The organizational structure and culture of higher education is opaque to most outside of it. This opacity means navigating higher education very difficult from the outside.

For example, academic leaders, such as deans, are only partly equivalent to managers in industry or officers in the military. Instead of using a single hierarchical model, higher education is modeled on shared governance, the gist of which is that universities are governed by two separate entities: the faculty and administration. The faculty are responsible for the vast majority of the academic content–curricula, lessons, research, grant proposals, inventions. Administration implements the faculty’s academic vision through hiring, policies and procedures, financial stewardship, and so on.

Deans (who were once faculty members themselves) are part of administration, and they control budgets, personnel decisions, set unit strategy, and so forth. Deans also supervise the unit’s staff, which includes support staff and professional staff. Staff are non-faculty employees who keep the unit running from day to day. Professional staff specialize in student advising, careers, admissions, diversity, course assignments, finances, etc.

The faculty make decisions concerning academic content, e.g., what should be researched, what counts as good research, what should be taught, what standards students should be held to, what degrees should be offered, etc. In short, faculty control the substance of the unit’s research and teaching missions, and at least one of these missions is where most partners are hoping to engage. Faculty control over the content means that deans cannot order a faculty member to take on a given research project, to write a given paper, invite a speaker to their course, etc.

That in turn means that in most cases, any given form of engagement–whether it is via research or teaching–sooner or later is going to need to reach a faculty member, who will need to consent to participate in it. But reaching that faculty member can be hard, and obtaining faculty members’ consent to participate can be even harder because the risk:reward ratio of doing so can be difficult for them to assess.

Challenge: Incentivizing Faculty to Participate

What might seem like a great opportunity from the perspective of someone in industry might not be perceived as such by a faculty member. The issue might be one of perception rather than reality, but understanding a faculty perspective can help industry partners pitch opportunities more effectively.

Most faculty members operate with significant autonomy internally. A unit’s faculty is almost like a guild comprising a collection of individual businesses. Faculty work on many simultaneous projects in research, teaching, and service, to build up their credentials. I have yet to meet a faculty member who is looking for another project; typically, they already feel overwhelmed by what they are already doing. So finding the right faculty partner means working through all of these layers to find the right person and help them see that they should take on a new project. To do so, it helps to understand the meanings of faculty titles.

Faculty in universities generally can be divided into two categories: permanent and non-permanent. Non-permanent faculty are often referred to as adjunct faculty. They are typically part-time and have jobs elsewhere, teaching because they enjoy it, seek extra income, and are experts in their areas.

Permanent faculty are typically divided into fixed-term faculty and tenure-track faculty. Fixed-term faculty are generally teaching faculty who work full-time for the university on rolling contracts; in most cases, they lead the unit’s teaching mission, though many also do some research.

Tenure-track faculty typically lead the unit’s research mission, though almost all of them also teach at least some.

Early career permanent faculty typically have the word “assistant” in their titles: assistant professor (tenure-track, pretenure) or assistant teaching professor. Mid-career permanent faculty often have “associate” in their titles: associate teaching professor, associate professor. And later-career faculty are just called Professor or Teaching Professor (sometimes also known as Full [Teaching] Professor). Tenure-track faculty typically do not have tenure at the assistant level, but they typically do have tenure at the associate and full levels.

Again, the title communicates quite a bit about both the faculty member’s career phase and career trajectory, and as such, how they will be predisposed to perceive an opportunity. Here are some examples, which are only offered as a crude rule of thumb.

• One might expect full professors to have well funded, established research labs. They are often responsible for supporting several (or more) Ph.D students, and to do so they go after and get grants that are commonly in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, and they are often working on projects that have continued for a decade or more. Understandably, $20,000 in project startup funds for a new project might not be all that enticing for them, since it cannot even support one student (note, Ph.D student costs vary by institution, but often they cost between 35-50k per year).
• At the other end of the spectrum is an assistant professor, who does not yet have tenure. This faculty member may have fewer grants and is facing expectations both to get grants and also to publish papers that collective offer at least one important intellectual contribution to the field that is internationally recognized as theirs throughout the field. The possibility of even small amounts of funding can be very attractive to them, but they are typically focused on developing a durable and internationally recognized research agenda in their discipline and they can’t afford to solve, for example, a business problem for an organization that is not otherwise of scientific/academic import.
• Teaching professors, in contrast, are more likely to fit for curricular engagements with industry. These might include industry-devised class projects, classroom visits, one-off lectures, contests, hackathons, providing hardware/software for class use, internship/recruiting events, and so on. Given that many are research active, however, with many engaging in scholarship on teaching and learning, they often do pursue external research projects as well.
• Adjunct professors, who are commonly part-time instructor-experts who work full-time somewhere else, seldom take on significant projects with external agencies in this role.

Again, these are sample scenarios and should not be taken too literally, but I hope they illustrate what typically motivates faculty and why cold calling them often fails.

Advice to Prospective Industry Partners

Prospective partners are advised to work with the university and the academic unit, and here is some practical advice on how to do so.

• Choose either a research- or teaching-oriented engagement and present your proposal as such. The distinction between research and teaching runs deep in higher education; the university is organized and financed in ways that reflect this distinction. It is native to all faculty and staff. Pursuing both is fine, but I would suggest pursuing them as two separate projects, with different goals and (likely) different personnel.
• Use academic leaders and/or staff to direct you to the right faculty members. Cold calling faculty members directly is unlikely to yield results. Universities often have outreach offices who specialize in these sorts of collaborations, and by all means use them. However, the university-level professionals often do not know the faculty or the content areas, which is why they often involve a unit’s administrators (such as deans and associate deans), because they know their own faculty members –their intellectual specialties and interests, career stages, availability, likely openness to certain kinds of projects, etc–as well as the academic content of their disciplines. Although these leaders cannot order a faculty member to work with you, they certainly can play matchmaker, and will if they feel that it will help their faculty member(s). So be clear when you meet with these leaders that you want them to recommend and/or connect you to specific people as part of the next steps. Otherwise, the project joins the disued pile of Ideas That Sounded Really Good At The Time. Also, feel free to solicit input from them on how to pitch the proposal to relevant faculty.
• When pitching to faculty, help them assess the risk-reward ratio on terms they can understand. What is the scope of their work, and what is the anticipated time commitment? If pursuing a grant is part of the project, who will write the proposal, who will be the PI, how will funds be distributed, who will participate in reporting? If engaging in a classroom interaction, how many class sessions is the engagement, what must the instructor do to prepare for it, how much meeting time is needed between the instructor and the partner? If proprietary tech is to be used, who will support it, onboard, and troubleshoot? Also, understand that the instructor alone is responsible for achieving student learning goals, so be clear that the instructor can veto the activity in part or whole, that the instructor will reserve the right to set it up and motivate it, and that the instructor alone can assign grades to students (although industry partners can provide input into that, of course).
• Map the funding to expenses they actually have. As mentioned earlier, if a Ph.D. student costs $40k, and the industry partner is offering a startup of $20k, then the startup cannot be used to hire a student. Course buyouts (which also vary but cost in the tens of thousands), summer salary for the faculty member (same), travel (can be less), are the sorts of expenses that research faculty think in. For teaching engagements, perhaps no money is exchanged, but time becomes the precious resource.
• Create an easy, early win. If this is your (or your company’s) first engagement with the academic unit, aim for a quick, easy win. It builds confidence all around, and serves as evidence that can support future, greater, investments of time and money.

Advice for Leaders in Higher Education

At the outset I said that we all want these collaborations to happen. Academic leaders have a role to help them do so.

• Create models and procedures that eliminate guesswork. Many faculty, myself included, who have brought industry partners into the classroom vastly underestimate how much work is involved with coordinating, scheduling, planning, meeting, etc. This can lead to burnout or an unwillingness to do it again. With explicit models and procedures, the uncertainty decreases. By a model I mean: XZY is how a sponsored capstone project (or: one-day hackathon) is implemented in our unit. Note that other units in the university and in other universities may have models, which are ready to be “borrowed”–leaders can do their homework to find out what they are. Also, with models and procedures, it becomes much easier to leverage staff, speaking of which…
• Leverage professional staff expertise. Both the university at-large and the academic unit have staff who have specialized knowledge, expertise, and usually sincere passion for the unit and the university. Get them involved early, and solicit their perspectives on how to make it all work, and then, within the scope of their positions (don’t dump the whole project on them!), let them do their jobs.
• Play matchmaker. Help match prospective partners and proposed projects to faculty. Faculty development should be the preeminent need; that is, the partnership should benefit that faculty member’s career, not burden it. Sometimes faculty–particular junior faculty eager to establish themselves–may be overly inclined to say yes, so be sure to support good decisionmaking.
• Reward effort. Recognize small wins in annual reviews and in tenure and promotion procedures, even if they do not yield conventional outcomes (e.g., a major grant, a published paper). Do not punish risk-takers if the risks were reasonable and sanctioned by leaders.
• Educate! As an administrator, I am pleasantly surprised at how much teaching I still do, only now my students are faculty and, in this case, potential industry partners. Administrators can educate both sides in their decisionmaking and communications, particularly with newer collaborations where partners are figuring out how universities work, and faculty sometimes get a crash course in how industry works.
• Communicate proactively about IP and overhead. Industry partners often assume that faculty can/will sign NDAs, but universities are also pretty assertive about IP created by its employees. Additionally, although universities don’t have profits, they do charge overhead, typically exceeding 50% of the funded work’s total, to cover its own expenses. Some partners balk at this and it can be dealbreaking. If it is dealbreaking, make sure it happens early in the process!

I hope this short guide helps industry partners successfully engage with the research and teaching missions of academic units in higher education, including (hint hint) my own.