Match made in Heaven or Hell? (Industry and Academia)

Universities research and create innovations to improve the status quo (be it in medicine, engineering, technology etc).

Companies develop and sell products and services that are made available to consumers, governments and other businesses.

One would think that the two groups above would be a natural fit to one another, in a symbiotic way, however this is sadly not the case in the majority of cases. There are many complex and varied reasons for this, and I would like to list a few and then suggest a way forward.

1. One side does not know what the other is doing. - There is complete opacity in the business world of what on earth are universities working on. Their circles do not match in any way and they do not even attend the same types of events. One goes to business fairs, and the other goes to academic conferences. On the other hand there is also almost complete naivety on the side of the academics who learn about the business world only by hearing the news on some of the largest businesses in the world (notably most of them American)
2. They do not share a common language - This is not for a lack of intelligence on either side but because they come from really different worlds. Cashflow, customer acquisition, sales pipeline mean nothing to academics, whilst on the other hand the same can be said of citations, hypotheses and investigations to the business people
3. They are all fighting different demons - Companies are struggling to generate money, raise investments and recruit employees, whilst academics need to secure their next grant, raise their publications profile and get that elusive professorship in a notable universities. This means that both sides are almost blinkered and just keep moving in their own trajectory.

So what can be done? How do we (the European ecosystem) make sure that we get these sides to meet, collaborate and do joint work for the benefit of all society?

I asked myself this for quite some years, and together with a team of similarly minded individuals from both sides (industry and academia) wrote a project which has the aim of creating 100 Joint Ventures. This is ambitious and somewhat crazy, but we want to give it a go and we managed to get the EU support to do this.

We will do this in 3 iterations ... first 20 matches, and then 40 and 40 in order to learn and then scale up internally, and we have the partners to support each side with this journey. We will also be training them in understanding the other side, in communications and giving basic tips on how to work together. Finally we also hope to entice investors and additional funding at the end of the process as this should not stop here, but we want to push the ventures to become beacons for others to follow.

If you are interested to either be one of The 100, or else can help us to continue to understand how to make this smoother, head over to www.venturealliances.eu and get in touch with us. Feel free to also email me directly on [email protected] as I would like to pick your brains to help really make such matches made in heaven, and not keep sending them to hell!