MIT Sloan Management Review

A further aspect of Practice 7 is stated succinctly by famed baseball player Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over ’til it’s over!” 9 A research project will generally not have achieved its full impact at the end of the contract with the university. The inward representation of the research results, which begins during the project’s period of active research, must therefore be maintained and even strengthened after the research has been completed. The project manager must take responsibility not only for this representation but also for ensuring the research is appropriately considered for possible action — successful completion of the project is a prerequisite for impact, but it by no means guarantees it, and the project manager typically needs to be proactive in taking the steps to make this happen.

Theory Versus Practice

Some companies were extraordinary in how they trained and rewarded project managers to facilitate research collaboration with a university, to strengthen internal awareness of the project’s progress and results and to ensure the results were evaluated by all relevant stakeholders. In other environments, however, even though company managers were aware of the value of the above practices, they paid little or no attention to implementing them. At one company, for example, all interviewees stressed the importance of informal technical communications and personal relationships, but the company briefing on managing university research made almost no reference to activities to develop such relationships.

The message from this study thus goes beyond identifying the seven practices. Merely talking a good game is not sufficient. What is needed is execution and follow-up of the actions: longer-term projects, continuing relationships, assigning project managers who make the contract feel like a partnership and enabling these managers to invest the time and effort to generate effective knowledge flows between the university and the company.

We understand the difficulties. The professionals who perform this function well are almost always needed for other jobs, the cost of their time is high and there is difficulty in capturing and defining the benefits for a given project. However, implementation of these seven practices can lead to

collaborations that create and deliver substantial value for a company.

Julio A. Pertuzé is a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Engineering Systems Division. Edward S. Calder is a manager at Innosight LLC, a consulting firm in Watertown, Massachusetts, specializing in business innovation. Edward M. Greitzer is H.N. Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. William A. Lucas is director of research at the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program. Comment on this article or contact the authors through smrfeedback@mit.edu.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The companies that participated in this study provided us access to information concerning their interactions with universities and were frank and forthright in sharing their best practices with us. Some of these companies have created true win-win collaborations with university partners. We also acknowledge the contributions during the early stages of this project of Nick Oliver of Edinburgh University and David Roessner of SRI International. Financial support for the research was provided by the Cambridge-MIT Institute and by the Kauffman Foundation. Julio A. Pertuzé would also like to acknowledge the support of a Fulbright fellowship.

REFERENCES

1. C. Ailes, D. Roessner and I. Feller, “The Impact on Industry of Interaction with Engineering Research Centers” (Arlington, Virginia: SRI International, 1997). 2. M.D. Santoro and S.C. Betts, “Making Industry-University Partnerships Work,” Research-Technology Management 45, no. 3 (May 2002): 42-46. 3. T.J. Allen, “Managing the Flow of Technology” ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). 4. D. Ancona, H. Bresman and K. Kaeufer, “The Comparative Advantage of X-Teams,” MIT Sloan Management Review 43, no. 3 (spring 2002): 33-39; and R. Reagans and E. W. Zuckerman, “Networks, Diversity, and Productivity: The Social Capital of Corporate R&D Teams,” Organization Science 12, no. 4 (July 2001): 502-517. 5. R. Reagans and B. McEvily, “Network Structure and Knowledge Transfer: The Effects of Cohesion and Range,” Administrative Science Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2003): 240-267. 6. Allen, “Managing the Flow.” 7. M. Polanyi, “The Tacit Dimension” (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966). 8. Reagans, “Network Structure and Knowledge Transfer.” 9. Y. Berra, “The Yogi Book” (New York: Workman Publishing, 1999), 121.