mjfizrk2 OKHE2 — Understanding the value of academic research to business and how that is balanced with openness
In my previous blog I introduced the idea of a conflict between covering the costs of academic research via contributions from business partners who benefit from the outputs, with the wider societal value achieved via openness. Here I delve deeper into these issues to understand how a balance might be achieved.
As discussed in my earlier blog, while there are many and widely recognised benefits of sharing academic outputs more openly, some people in the sector are less than keen on the idea of businesses funding, and potentially therefore influencing, research. I introduced the opposing views that universities being described as “open for business” was not in the interest of openness and academic freedom, (Anne Hesketh OKHE blog 2017), compared to the view of Shumit Mandal that universities should be better at recognising their commercial value in the blog: “If You’re Good at Something, Never Do It for Free.”
Clearly, publication of research results is an imperative driver often viewed as the defining characteristic of academia, whereas secrecy of disclosure in the form of patents to protect valuable new ideas from competitors is a key aspect of commercial logic. Does this indeed provide a conflict?
Academic Output & Impact
Looking at other views on this topic from colleagues at Manchester brings me to the OKHE blogs by Knowledge Exchange & Impact (KE&I) Officer Carly Chadwick. The business engagement team works with the KE&I team on some collaboration activity so this is an interesting angle for me. Carly discussed Openness with regard to research impact and raises some useful questions; research impact is defined by HEFCE as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia”. Research funders therefore see “greater social and economic benefit from research as an argument for Open Access which is a welcome development; if academic research is to make a difference, we need to share new knowledge with those who can benefit from it”. As concluded by Carly in her OKHE2 post on Openness, Engagement and Academic Identity, “open knowledge can improve research quality and accelerate the impact of academic research”.
What does Business Engagement mean?
In the Business Engagement function our role is to help identify opportunities for partnerships between academic researchers and non-academic partners. Yes, this does mean that there’s an element of bringing in funding from business partners, it is becomingly increasingly important for academic institutions to diversifying income to cover research costs; however this is not the sole objective of collaborative partnerships.
Why do academics collaborate with business?
Academics are looking for problems to solve, questions to answer, to generate new knowledge, to apply their thinking or methodologies in applied and impactful ways. They might have proven a concept or tested a methodology and would like to try it out in different applications; it could be that they need access to new data-sets to do some analysis it and see what new insights can be gained. Business partners bring useful insights to research, as well as knowledge they can bring data, or access to their systems and people, all of this helps steer research into useful directions, creating positive economic and social impacts from our academic expertise.
By co-producing research projects with partner organisations our academics have access not just to business questions that can be addressed through their research expertise but also to knowledge, data and more that can bring great value to research projects as well as providing opportunity for generating tangible impacts, both social and economic. Such partnerships also improve student experience as lecturers can discuss real-world applied research based on recent applied projects allowing students to better understand the role of their discipline in the wider world, including opportunities for project work to be undertaken by students themselves, in certain programmes.
Our role is to operate in the space between business need and academic interest, not steering research to meet business need but to find the opportunities for partnerships that will be truly mutually beneficial.
Why do businesses work with academia and fund research?
Essentially businesses are attracted to working with universities for access to the latest knowledge and expertise that might provide them with a competitive advantage, and to access the top emerging talent from the student base. As discussed in my OKHE1 post, research is generally undertaken at a loss, so universities need to find new sources of funding to cover the costs of research, rather than subsidise from student fees. Will these pieces of information shift opinion towards the need for businesses to fund research costs where there is potential for them to gain commercially useful insight?
Indeed, where businesses can achieve a tangible business benefit from academic partnerships, State Aid rules dictate that they cannot have access to this benefit from publicly funded research and are therefore required to contribute. Given the value of business partnerships to our researchers, as described above; this gives two credible reasons for us to actively pursue research income from business partners. But where does this fit with open knowledge?
The value of openness
Openness in research publication has a number of connotations and impacts. By allowing access to published work for further academic study, this allows more minds to contribute to furthering findings, whereas keeping publications behind paywalls keeps readership low and prevents some great minds from benefiting. As an example, visiting speaker Chukwuma described to us in one of the course sessions how in Nigeria he does not have access to most widely available journals as the universities cannot afford subscriptions. This provides a massive barrier to furthering knowledge by blocking researchers’ access to published work in their field.
But, as pointed out in this OKHE2 blog, open doesn’t always necessarily mean free, such as with the Open University which is accessible without entry requirements, but is not free, or online services such as Google, which are available to anyone but have their own costs involve — you are the product, your data is your payment…
And of course paywalls are not the only barrier — language barriers, including language style, academic prose is difficult for non-specialists to comprehend, even academics in different disciplines, let alone outside of academia, this is another barrier academics should consider. There are now tools such as online platform Kudos for writing plain language summaries of papers. Acting as “translators” of academic outputs for potential users is one function of teams such as Business Engagement and Knowledge Exchange.
The value of academic output to business
Businesses in all sectors benefit from looking outside its organisational boundaries for innovative business ideas, and for applying, developing and validating those ideas. Academia can be one source of new business ideas so it is in companies’ interests to discuss their challenges openly to help identify where collaborators can add value.
Whereas academics seek intriguing questions that allow them to apply their knowledge and expertise in new ways, achieve impact cases and publishable new knowledge, industry partners will always ask — what’s the value to us in this piece of work? In establishing new relationships, especially with companies not familiar with working with any Higher Education Institutions, there is work to be done to demonstrate what academic expertise can deliver in the business context; this requires universities to be open with examples of previous outputs, especially projects undertaken in collaboration with partners. Ideally case studies can showcase what a business challenge was, what work was undertaken by academics, what input was required from the business, and how the challenge was addressed.
This requires partners to be open to the activity being undertaken and its impact on their business. It is therefore in university interest to encourage businesses to be open to being open!
What do the papers say?
Concerns regarding industry funding for research being potentially damaging to the principles of open science have been reported for many years, a notable early example being R.K. Merton in 1973. While the benefits of openness for innovation have been well recognised by both academia and industry, there’s not much in the way of examples of open knowledge flows between these two sectors. Doing a dive into some academic literature I didn’t find much specifically addressing the value and conflicts in business-academic collaboration, however papers looking at open innovation in business have been increasing massively since publication of Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology by Chesbrough in 2003. This extensively discusses the business models and drivers for more openness in innovation. Indeed, businesses are increasingly recognising the value of openness and collaboration, since 2014 there’s been an annual World Open Innovation Conference.
In the book Chesbrough discusses the long-standing academic collaboration strategy at technology firm Intel, which has a programme of academic research funding with which it agrees that the company will have license-free use of any patentable outputs of research it funds, regardless of if and how rights are later assigned to IP. This model of agreement is fairly common in business funded academic research partnerships, it is useful in allowing academic institutions or students to retain ownership of their outputs while business partners benefit in perpetuity in utilising new knowledge and technology at no further cost. Beyond this, in regularly reviewing bids for its research funding programme the company is gaining regular insight into research strategy and early access to potentially valuable research findings.
The motivations and barriers for businesses undertaking open innovation are examined by Alexy et al in the 2016 paper Toward an Aspiration-level Theory of Open Innovation. While there is now much evidence of the benefits of open innovation, given the unpredictability of fundamental academic research, it can be difficult for companies to justify spend on research where the outputs are not possible to define. Another 2016 paper by Zobel et al “Does Patenting Help or Hinder Open Innovation? Evidence from New Entrants in the Solar Industry”, it is acknowledged that firms may be “unwilling to share” outputs with competitors without protections in place, but interestingly the study found that higher patenting actually leads to increased further collaboration
So do formal intellectual property rights hinder the free flow of scientific knowledge? An empirical test of the anti-commons hypothesis was conducted by Murray & Stern in 2007. This found that patenting outputs had a slight but a measurable “anti-commons” effect; however the paper acknowledges that it did not capture whether or not IP rights assigned to academic research lead to enhanced incentives for further research to build on the ideas, or lead to more effective commercialisation. So, my search of the literature has certainly not concluded that the pursuit of business partnerships to help fund and further research development & impact opportunities is necessarily at odds with pursuing greater openness with academic outputs.
Conversely we could argue for the benefits of businesses openly working with academics, beyond the potential “social responsibility” and “investing in future talent” that comes from funding PhDs for example, there is great integrity and positive reputation to be gained from such partnerships. Consumer trust is a major issue for companies in many sectors; wrking openly with prestigious and respected academic institutions can add credibility to products and services developed through such relationships. Business need to balance this with maintaining a competitive edge from publication of findings that their peers could access.
Open can be competitive
Major funding bodies such as Innovate UK are increasingly utilising Challenge-led funding seeking to support collaborative R&D programmes that will address key societal challenges such as Digital trust or Ageing Society. These calls are competitive but unlike many traditional grant funding calls are open to businesses of different scales from start up to multinational corporations; and not restricted to those operating in specific sectors, the best ideas and the best partnerships offering tangible solutions to the identified challenges are eligible for funding to develop those ideas. The Industrial Strategy Challenge fund is a current major example of such a funding model.
There is the concept of dual knowledge, in which a single discovery may contribute to both scientific research and useful commercial applications. Patents & licenses can be negotiated to cover specific sectors and applications only, since there may be potential applications in other areas that a given partner would never pursue. Rights agreements should allow universities to work with other partners to develop others uses, within acceptable terms to collaborative partners. Large challenge-based collaborations are a good platform for establishing models with such agreements towards openness for further development of outputs with a wider range of stakeholders who may benefit and also be able to contribute.
Conclusion — How can openness be incorporated into the research process?
It’s clear that if universities work together they are more likely to find creative solutions to problems. Collaboration will allow universities to benefit from the global academic community’s collective wisdom. This first needs to start WITHIN institutions, allowing academics from different disciplines to access, learn from, and have opportunity to develop further, findings of their peers from other disciplines with which they may not regularly interact.
A key barrier to collaborations between researchers in different disciplines is the imperative to publish in journals recognised by their respective specialisms. Publishing cross-discipline research presents problems with journals not accepting papers that are across disciplines, which have a substantial amount of content not relevant to the journal’s specialism. This, along with wider incentives within the academic career path to collaborate across disciplines and with business, is something that still needs to be better addressed by academic institutions themselves.
Just putting academic findings “out there” doesn’t bring impact alone, it doesn’t mean it will be read or acted upon. We need to look at mechanisms to maximise where and how new knowledge is used. At The University of Manchester we have a successful team of people who work with academics to get academic findings into public policy. The award-winning Policy@Mcr format has been widely recognised and other institutions are now using this model to establish similar teams themselves. This should be seen as a positive, by establishing successful and recognised mechanisms to help openness and generating societal impact from academic outputs.
Many Higher Academic Institutions have shared repository platforms, at Manchester there is a system which tries to do most of the “leg-work’ to make it easy for our academics to publish openly, with articles deposited via Staffnet. Various academics now state they will not provide peer reviews for publications in closed access journals. This makes sense from the perspective of advancing knowledge and few academics would argue with the benefits of making publications available for other researchers to use them. To allow this but without making access to output fully public, could access be limited to academic researchers, requiring registration for access via .ac email accounts, for example? This may appeal more to business partners who were wary of outputs being shared on fully public platforms.
These are great examples of initiatives that are supporting impact of academic expertise in the wider world, but as above, key to driving an increase in open and collaborative working is a need for internal policy and process to support it.
NB: As a side note I was interested to find, when looking back at my OKHE1 post, that this message appeared: “this story is eligible to be part of the metered paywall”!
