Open for business

Collecting evidence

There is plenty of evidence that closer engagement between universities and businesses brings significant benefits – from increased support for research and faster commercialisation of new technologies, to better job prospects for students. In the chemical sciences, universities and companies have traditionally had very strong links, but the precise nature and extent of these relationships has not been documented at the national level.

Our research is a first step to doing this: building a university-based picture of what is happening on the ground and what challenges and opportunities are unique to chemistry.

Beneficial to an academic career path

It is clear there is a high level of enthusiasm within the academic chemistry community to build links with businesses, not just on collaborative research projects, but also in enterprise and skills development activities.

These interactions are enabled in different ways but a recurrent theme is the importance of strong relationships between people. Personal connections are the primary way chemistry academics identify new research collaborators and departments make extensive use of alumni networks in mentoring, advisory and training activities.

We also found no evidence to suggest that dedicating staff time to engaging with businesses harms an institution’s performance in the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The Dowling Review of University Business Collaborations found that some universities see collaborating with industry as damaging to an academic career path. And in chemistry we had heard concerns that collaboration with industry could have a negative impact on performance in the REF assessment. We calculated a research engagement score for the institutions that took part in our survey and found that high scores had no adverse effect on their institution’s grade point average (GPA) in the 2014 REF exercise. In fact, departments that engaged in a larger number of research collaborations, as measured by our score, tended to have a higher ranking by GPA.

Increasing awareness

Chemistry departments are strongly engaged with businesses but some barriers remain. Building a network of contacts with industry is challenging for academics, particularly those early on in their career, and there are still issues around negotiating intellectual property agreements for collaborative research. Increasing awareness of the range of funding opportunities available for industry engagement and improving access to this funding could also help to foster further collaborations. Sharing good practice and possible solutions is a vital step to overcoming these challenges.

In parallel with our Open for Business report, we have created an online collection of up-to-date case studies showcasing many different types of university–business engagement. One of our goals in sharing this research is to enable individuals and chemistry departments to connect with one another and draw on these existing examples. Many of these schemes and programmes would be applicable to other STEM subjects.
We’re also inviting you to share your own experiences of university–business engagement in the chemical sciences, be this from a department, company or innovation supporter perspective.

The findings will inform our own programmes to connect people from universities and businesses. We also hope that the overview of barriers, together with possible ways of overcoming them, will be useful to the wider community of people, companies and organisations committed to building effective links between universities and businesses.

Further information

Download our Open for Business report, browse our case studies and share your experiences here.