On the 'selling' of academic research to industry

摘要

Technology transfer does not happen automatically. One of the primary reasons that academic research fails to be adopted by industrial practitioners is that the benefits of doing so are not obvious. In contrast, the perceived drawbacks of even attempting to do so are easy to enumerate. This paper argues that academics need to be a better job of "selling" their research to industry in order to facilitate the transfer of their results. One facet of this self-marketing effort is to pro-actively address some of the likely objections that someone from industry might have, such as convincing them that academic research is relevant to their work, that successful prior collaborations are applicable to their situation, and that they will definitely see a short-term return on their investment.