The 3 R’s of successful Academic-Industry Digital Alliances, as seen from Industry - Research, Results, Revenue
Paul Lefrere, Microsoft EMEA and eLearning Industry Group

The e-Learning Industry Group contains several universities and over 50 companies, including IBM, Apple, Cisco and Microsoft. Paul Lefrere has looked at academy-industry alliances in different industries including biotechnology, agriculturea and health, dating back to the 1970s, from several different perspectives. He saw the same patterns and the same mistakes - different expectations about what counts as success, challenges never properly addressed.

Organisations, he said, must learn and re-engineer themselves from such partnerships. Top-level expectations come down and that is what the alliance is measured on. A single alliance cannot deliver all the expectations - novel research, innovative teaching, lower costs, and so on. These expectations may come from university administrators or company stockholders.

Drawing on his experience at Microsoft (which spends over $6 billion a year in research), Lefrere said that many projects - such as those presented at the Symposium - are too small to interest large corporations, which will only invest in areas where they cannot compete or where the return on investment is high. But for such projects, corporations tend to enlist partners such as publishers or resellers, and then evangelize about the product concept. They are looking for someone to take a good idea to market, but not necessarily with their own money. For a company like Microsoft, partnerships must be with the best researchers in the field, because they want the best ROI, usually on a tight time schedule.

An inherent problem with research projects is that they take a long time, and technologies, by contrast, change quickly. Therefore projects cannot focus on specific technologies. In addition, academic and corporate timeframes must align. Jeremy Roschelle, speaking from the audience, echoed this, saying that academics have to be able to respond quickly to consultancy requests from industry - sometimes companies will want a research review done in three weeks.

A spirited discussion followed Lefrere's talk.