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Industry Academia Partnerships: Sustaining Growth and Competitiveness
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
By S. Manian Ramkumar, Ph.D., RIT
A well-established and innovatively nurtured industry-academia partnership can be a win/win proposition in many dimensions and help both parties retain their leadership positions. The importance of such partnerships has become apparent in the U.S. in recent years. Primary factors attributed to the importance and, in many cases, urgency include global competition, industry outsourcing, inability to meet workforce demands in skilled technology fields, reduced research funding levels, short product and technology lifecycles requiring quick-turnaround/low-cost R&D, and continued decline in technical graduates coming to the U.S. Both the U.S. industry and academia have realized their declining competitive advantage due to the above factors and are reassessing their partnership strategies.
Different areas of collaboration could include curriculum and laboratory development, student recruitment, resource sharing to teach, conducting research, development of new processes and improving process efficiencies, and increasing awareness locally and regionally. This can be achieved only by identifying and sharing the essential components of the partnership such as human capital, equipment capital, and knowledge base. This article examines several of these strategies put into practice at the Center for Electronics Manufacturing and Assembly (CEMA) at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
The primary role of academia is to turn out multifaceted, highly trained talent that the industry can use to enhance its growth and maintain its competitive edge. This begins by defining a curriculum that embodies strong fundamental knowledge with practice-oriented education. Industry involvement at every stage of this process ensures relevance to the real world. Curriculum development should be a joint effort between faculty experts and a council of industry representatives. The curricular flexibility while being able to maintain its strength and integrity and the ability to respond to industry needs is still unique to the U.S. academic environment. This uniqueness and advantage is unmatched in foreign university settings, which typically can be bogged down with rules and regulations. Collaboration in the U.S. opens new avenues for workforce training and development and possible opportunities for continuing education for many within the industry.
While post-secondary education and the entire public school system (K12) in the U.S. struggle to keep pace with technology advances, technology education is inferior in many developing countries, to which the U.S. industry has been outsourcing. Many foreign universities, excepting a handful of them, have not yet embraced the concept of corporate relationships, industrial advisory councils, cooperative education, and student-supported basic and applied research. The U.S., in spite of declining concentration on technology education, continues to maintain a definite strength and lead in this regard. This strength should be sustained by the U.S. industry and academia in order to maintain leadership in science and technology.
Applied R&D and basic research should become another strong suite for many universities in the U.S., as we've found at the CEMA at RIT. This will help industry retain core competencies within the US, without having to outsource to low-cost geographies. The only way to succeed with applied R&D is to identify industry needs, understand industry's timeline and time-to-market pressures, and price services competitively. Many projects on the industry's priority list suffer lack of resources and time: prime candidates that universities can address concurrently with industry, under corporate R&D agreements, in a way that will alleviate the intellectual property (IP) ownership dilemma and provide full rights to industry. According to Dr. Destler, president of RIT, "Higher education institutions in the U.S. are still without question the finest in the world and graduate students are still the most cost-effective R&D labor force anywhere." Sustained involvement and participation of industry representative in the project progress is an essential component for the success of applied R&D relationships.
The use of academic facilities and capacity sharing with academia is another area of possible collaboration. Industry and academia can maintain joint ownership of equipment and technical expertise. The major concern from industry in this regard would be the lack of quality standards and systems within academia to match that of industry, which can be easily addressed. This partnership will strengthen grant applications and to a large extent avoid duplication of resources between many universities and industry. Development of complementary capabilities is essential in today's environment. Dr. Destler also contends that the laboratory assets existing within the US universities are prohibitively expensive for most industry to reproduce. This is true especially of many small- and medium-sized U.S. manufacturers and also many foreign universities and industry. This competitive advantage of U.S. universities should be harnessed to its fullest extent.
Industry and academia partnerships can play a major role in student recruitment, retention, and workforce development from within the local economy, through positive promotion of strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Industry partnerships with universities, promoted within school systems, will have a major impact on reducing manpower shortages in critical technological areas. There often are misconceptions regarding professions and careers and uninformed advice provided to parents and students. Most of the information is derived from articles in local and national news outlets describing the many negative events happening within the industry. In the same light, many more positive things have happened to the industry, which have practically gone un-noticed and un-reported.
Manufacturing, for example, has a tarnished image that never seems to attract young students except for a dedicated few, primarily due to the gloomy news regarding outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. There have been many instances of jobs returning back to the U.S. from the outsourced destinations for lack of quality, excessive bureaucracy, corruption, lack of applied engineering talent, lack of IP protection, etc. These incidents have never been reported with the same prominence that is placed when the jobs are outsourced. Identifying ways to communicate this will be essential to attract young talent into technological disciplines that are essential for a nation's economic prosperity.
Conclusion Automated manufacturing, along with a concerted effort to implementing lean principles and six sigma practices thoroughly, definitely have improved the U.S. industry's competitiveness. To develop technological talent locally, industry should offer attractive scholarships in collaboration with academia, and be willing to make commitments to provide co-op experiences and possible long-term employment.
S. Manian Ramkumar, Ph.D., is an SMT Editorial Advisory Board member and faculty professor and director at the Center for Electronics Manufacturing and Assembly (CEMA) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Ramkumar helped orchestrate SMT and RIT's joint conference "Implementing Lead-free." He is involved in applied research; presents technical papers at industry conferences; and teaches SMT and advanced packaging. Contact him at smrmet@rit.edu; smt.rit.edu.