Okay, our next presenter is Dr. Lou Graziano,
who's an independent consultant specializing
in partnership development.
In July of this year, Lou retired
from the Dow Chemical Company,
where he was director of University R&D Strategy,
building collaborations between Dow
and its university partners.
And perhaps most importantly,
he was the UIDP rep for Dow, so Lou.
Well, good afternoon, I guess, everybody.
Am I on okay?
Yeah, well, thanks a lot for coming
and taking your time to talk about this issue.
I think it's really important to continue
to have a public dialogue about university, industry,
government partnerships.
I think that's where things change
and it kind of gives an opportunity for everybody
to understand what's going on and start to turn their minds
and their brains about how things can be done better.
And I think it's good to see all the people involved here.
So the things I want to talk about today
through my slides initially is I want to talk
a little bit about why should we even be partnering?
The collaboration nature
of university-industry partnerships,
I'd like to spend a lot of time on that
because a lot of people think
that university-industry programs are about us providing funds
to do some additional work and things like that.
But when done properly, they really have an impact
and they're very involved and take a lot of resources
other than just the funds that are being provided.
And I'll talk a little bit about the benefits
to the university-industry and to society in general
and what we can do to continue to promote
creating a good, strong, robust program in partnerships.
So why even partner at all?
Well, I'm not going to go through every reason
because there's a million reasons to partner,
but just to touch on a few,
and Michael mentioned a couple things already,
from an industry standpoint,
it really helps us to ensure talent development
in areas that are strategic to us.
So by providing the, not just the funds,
but providing the opportunities
and the definition of technical problems
that are important and are relevant to us
and making sure that students and faculty
are working in those areas,
it ensures that we're working towards things
that are going to be strategic to our future,
to the employees we need in the future
and the kind of things we need to do.
What's really important about having a strong partnership
at a very deep level
is you begin to really understand
the needs of each other, okay?
University has different needs,
industry has different needs,
and sometimes they're a little bit in conflict,
but by having a strong partnership,
you can work through those
and find ways to get through those things.
One of the things that was mentioned
was the conflict that arises
because the industry has often a shorter time
for seeing the return on their investments
and the importance of being able to protect
the things that they've developed and their IP.
And of course on the university side,
a major part of their goal
was to bring knowledge out to society
and be able to publish.
And we manage that very well.
In fact, when I was an industry,
one of our metrics was really publications.
We love having publications out there
for the work that we're supporting.
And that's really important.
Now, sometimes there's little blips in there
because we also love making sure
that when we have inventions out there,
we're not disclosing things before they're protected.
So by having a deep partnership with the university,
you can understand that better.
You can have those discussions,
you can get through them.
And so it's, you know,
there's a little bit of tension between those two drivers,
but it's very manageable.
And I think both parties
and a strong partnership get to know each other.
And you uncover opportunities
that you maybe didn't see
when you entered into a partnership.
And one thing I'd like to bring up,
and this is outside of collaborations,
we recognize through the strong partnerships that we had
that there was a real opportunity
to help the universities improve their safety culture.
Industries made big investments over many years
and making sure we have a good, strong, safe culture.
And universities have a situation
where people are coming in from high school
and all of a sudden they're faced with dealing with hazards
that maybe they didn't deal with before.
And they're hazards that are all manageable.
They're things that the industry has learned to do,
not just through the proper protection,
but more importantly to creating a good safety culture
and how we think about our work every day.
So what we did is we partnered
with a number of our academic partners
and worked with them to help them understand
how we go about creating that culture.
To help them create an interdependent safety culture
that's appropriate for them.
And I think that was really well received.
I think it really has helped the universities
and their environments.
And we took a lot of what we did,
even though a lot of it was about interacting,
but we took a lot of modules
and also made them publicly available
through what we call our safety journey website,
available to everybody.
Anyone can get online there
and see a lot of the ways
in making a safer work environment.
But that's the depth of the partnership
that you, the kind of things that happen
in a deep partnership that you would not get necessarily,
you wouldn't go after until you understood each other
and understood the environments that we're working in.
So I'd like to talk a little bit
about the collaborative nature
of university industry projects.
Again, it's a lot more than the funds
that are provided to be able to do research.
The things that are brought to the table
on the industry side are strong scientific collaboration.
When they're done right, that's where the impact is.
You have weekly, monthly discussions going on
between university and faculty and students.
In some cases, we'd see times,
see projects across a number of groups
where students actually had their sort of go-to person
in industry to consult with on a regular basis
to take some of the informality out of getting together
and do project reviews and just kind of bounce ideas
off each other.
It's really been really good in that way.
Both the university and faculty,
university and industry,
bring different facilities to the table.
So you got to enter into these with an open mind
because when you enter into a project,
sometimes it can be months or years down the road
before you say, hey, this would be really good
if we could get this capability.
Oh, hey, we've done that here.
We've made this modification.
That kind of exchange is great.
And then having students come to our locations,
us coming to their locations on a regular basis,
that's a lot of resource that goes into it.
And then to follow on,
to make those programs successful
and get out in society and the kind of investments
that have to go on in terms of the development,
the scale up and even the marketing and sales is huge.
It's huge in comparison to the research dollars
that go into starting these projects.
So the partnership benefits for these kind of collaborations.
One of them, and I think Michael touched on this,
is the relevance of projects
that the industrial partner can bring to the table.
We're all doing a lot of relevant science,
but to try to get that the technologies that you develop
moved on to where they benefit society
in terms of a product or in terms of jobs
and things like that.
That relevance of a specific technical problem to work on
and to apply some of the basic research
that university is doing to those
is really, really profoundly valuable.
I've had a lot of students come up to me and say,
boy, we love that we're working on this
and that you guys are coming here to find out about it.
It shows us how interested you are in the research here.
And that's just really valuable.
By bringing these teams together,
there's a lot broader idea generation.
So you're taking really strong minds
from industry and academia together.
And let's remember, a lot of these industry people
just came out of academia.
So there's not that big a separation.
You bring just a lot of thought,
processes together to tackle a problem
and it can really reap benefits.
So that's really good for the programs as well.
So what we wanna do is continue to maintain
a strong university industry partnership.
And we do that at the leadership level
as well as the scientist level.
It allows us, by having leaders involved
at the university partners together,
we're able to align our strategic goals
and come up with ideas for things to partner together on
in the future.
It helps us understand the culture,
helps within the industry to understand the university culture.
And I think we understand that
and then the industry to understand the university culture.
And I think we understanding each other,
you can make a lot more progress
if you have that kind of knowledge about each other.
We can get together for joint advocacy opportunities
to be able to help each other's goals get furthered.
One very important thing is to have some consistency.
Any kind of partnership, personal or professional,
you want no surprises.
You wanna try to avoid surprises.
And I think you need an understanding of each other
to be able to do that.
And if you get leadership with common objectives,
they can work together towards a common goal.
So it's a win-win proposition really,
this whole partnership continuum.
Universities and industry and government
can do things to continue to make it better.
Keep looking at new ways of partnering.
Universities, I think, can do a good job
in trying to create an environment
that courts sustained university industry
collaboration partnerships.
Not just big guys, but little guys.
A lot of times the big companies,
they have a lot more money to throw around.
So sometimes that's more attractive.
But I think for the universities,
they need to continue to find ways
to work with any industry, any industry partner.
And that's really important to sustaining that.
As far as industry goes,
they need to continue to carve out
strategic university industry investments,
making sure that we have really strong,
long-lasting collaborations.
And from a government standpoint,
they need to pave the path,
help us pave the path to collaboration opportunities.
And by that, I mean the two major things
are look for ways to reduce barriers to collaborating,
any barriers related to IP rules and things like that,
to get them out of the way,
let the universities and industry
come up with the ways that they can work together
that make sense for both of them
to keep a collaboration going.
And another way is continue to foster
some of the opportunities for the ICRCs,
the other opportunities that university and industry
and government can work together in.
So that's it.
And thank you very much.
