Effective technology transfer in Rolls-Royce - the practical assessment of business benefits

摘要

The Rolls-Royce University Technology Centres (UTCs) that have been created over the past ten years are widely recognised as one of the more effective models of industrial/academic collaboration. The UTC model, for example, has been closely copied by GE Aircraft Engines -Rolls-Royce's prime competitor - a fact explicitly acknowledged by David Wisler of General Electric [1]. All three authors have been closely associated with the Design University Technology Partnership (UTP), which is a development of the basic UTC model in which two companies (BAE SYSTEMS and Rolls-Royce) and three universities (Cambridge, Sheffield and Southampton) have come together to research matters of common interest in the field of engineering design. In common with most evaluations of research activity, assessments of UTC performance often identify technology transfer as one of the most critical issues in the UTC-RR chain. As a consequence there are many mechanisms by which technology transfer is now encouraged and planned to take place. At the working level these include people transfer in either direction, project categorisation methods to identify appropriate technology transfer mechanisms and the use of simple check-lists as an active project management tool and for comparison across projects. In particular each Design UTP project is encouraged to develop and maintain its own portfolio of mechanisms within a project management framework called a Potential Exploitation Plan. This paper is thus concerned with the evaluation of technology transfer from a series of completed research projects, and not with methods of research project selection per se, although, as will be seen later, the tools and techniques used can be related.