As funding from their state governments plummets, and with little or no growth likely in the federal R&D programs that pay for most of the research they perform, US research universities are looking to industry for support. University officials are hopeful that US corporations, which perform little basic research of their own and are mostly flush with profits, can be wooed into research partnerships that will benefit both.
Public research universities nationwide have been squeezed hard; appropriations from state governments have plunged an average of 20% in inflation-adjusted terms from 1989 through 2009, according to the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. Nearly a third of that decline occurred in 2008 and 2009. The University of California’s 10 campuses have lost more than one-quarter of their state funding during the past four years. The federal funding picture is little better; the appropriations process to date for the fiscal year beginning 1 October 2011 has R&D budgets that stay even with the current fiscal year, which in turn were essentially the same as FY 2010. That’s a far cry from the doubling of funding that President Obama at the start of his term had promised for the Department of Energy, NSF, and NIST programs that fund most basic research in the physical sciences.
Industry is still a largely untapped resource. US companies supplied $2.9 billion, or about 6%, of the $52 billion of R&D funds that academic institutions received in 2008, according to NSF figures. That compares with the 20% that universities themselves provided for their research programs. A survey released early this year by the Industrial Research Institute, whose 200-plus corporate members perform or finance roughly half of the privately funded R&D in the US, showed that 39% of respondents planned to increase their spending on university research and 32% also would step up participation in research consortia that involve universities. More than half of the remaining respondents planned to maintain 2010 levels of sponsorship for research partnerships and consortia.
Focusing on the practical
Bank of America chairman Chad Holliday heads a National Academies committee on the future of research universities. Its report, expected to be released late this year, will likely urge more widespread R&D partnering between business and academia, Holliday told a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in July. “It looks to us like the supply chain [of partnerships] happens more at random rather than in a planned way,” he said. “Is there a way to put those partnerships together without destroying academic freedom?” he asked.
Holliday, formerly chairman of DuPont, said that corporate leaders are rapidly realizing that they must spend significant capital on university research to keep up with competitors in China, Japan, and other countries where academic partnerships are widespread. He added that he expects US industry to also partner with foreign universities.
Harvard University professor Venkatesh Narayanamurti told PCAST that academia must adapt to the new funding climate by refocusing physical sciences research on real-world problems “using fundamental science for a purpose and practical problems as a stimulus to curiosity.” Narayanamurti cochairs an American Academy of Arts and Sciences committee on the impacts of federal and industry funding on universities.
At a discussion with reporters in July, A. J. Stewart Smith, dean of research at Princeton University, said that industry support for academic research has evolved over the past quarter century from philanthropy, to licensing of inventions, to relationships motivated mostly by the opportunity for industrial partners to shape the training of students who will become employees. “What large companies want is a relationship that involves student transfer as much as anything else,” echoed Leslie Tolbert, vice president for research at the University of Arizona. “They want interns to come in as undergraduate and graduate students; they want access to them as new hires.” At North Carolina State University, industry is helping to develop the curriculum for a new “professional science master’s” degree, added Terri Lomax, vice chancellor for research and graduate studies. The new degree is aimed at some of the 85% of graduate students who don’t remain in academia; it will prepare them for careers in business. Students take business and management courses and are placed in internships; they do not have to write theses.
Collaborations and one-on-ones
Some industry–academia partnerships are collaborations seeded with federal funds. Two have been unveiled this summer. In June Obama announced a federal manufacturing initiative that will target up to $500 million for cooperative research on new and more efficient manufacturing processes, with the goal of improving US competitiveness (see PHYSICS TODAY, August 2011, page 27). A few weeks later, NSF unveiled a new program to attract individuals from industry and venture capital firms to serve as mentors to NSF grantees in commercializing technologies developed at universities. Private foundations also are contributing to the NSF Innovation Corps program, dubbed I-Corps.
But many companies have developed long-term one-on-one relationships with one or more universities. John Deere has partnered with universities for two decades, says Jerry Duncan, the company’s manager of university R&D relations. As Deere began getting into research on how people interact with machines, Duncan realized it would be less expensive and take less time to use capabilities already available at Georgia Tech. Deere later joined a University of Pennsylvania research project that was developing a digital human model with Department of Defense support. The company now uses that model, known as Jack, in the design of new products and in harvester-operator training simulators. Today, Deere has ongoing partnerships with Iowa State University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Georgia Tech. A dozen ISU graduates have gone to work at Deere, and the company has hired students from the other schools. “It’s not just the training and education and knowledge that they have at the moment, it’s the potential that they have over a long period of time,” Duncan says. He notes that partnerships give companies a far better opportunity to spot talent than they get through job interviews.
In May, Brown University and General Motors signed an agreement in which the automaker is to provide $2 million over five years to Brown’s Collaborative Research Laboratory on Computational Materials Science. The center, supported by GM for the past 10 years, develops simulations that predict the mechanical properties of materials used in automotive applications, such as the behavior of aluminum during the forming and evolution of aluminum–silicon alloys.
Irreplaceable funding
Industry should be careful not to regard universities as a source of short-term applied research, cautions Clyde Briant, vice president for research at Brown. Briant says that academic institutions, unlike corporations such as General Electric, where he worked for 18 years, are not set up to do applied work. To develop a product in industry, he says, “You really need a whole support team. You have to have people who deeply know the problem, and you’ve got to quickly judge if you’ve got a solution, and understand the economic impacts.” Those aren’t skills that are readily available on campus.
Academic research administrators warn that industrial support will never be sufficient to supplant federal funding. “There is simply no substitute for the type, the quality, and the scale of federal funding. It’s the key to the innovative engine of this country,” says Stephen Forrest, vice president for research at the University of Michigan. Despite 10 years of effort to attract more industry funding, the fraction of UM’s $1.3 billion research portfolio paid for by industry has been stuck at 5%, he laments, the same as a decade ago. Adds Mel Bernstein, vice provost for research at Northeastern University, “We understand the clear pressures on the federal budget. But there really is no substitute for the kind of support the federal government provides.”
