Strengthen the front door
One way OSU hopes to improve its business partnerships and technology commercialization is to firm up its front door.
Mutual benefitThe Honda-OSU Partnership has stood the test of time
“One thing that has been very successful in the Honda-OSU partnership is making sure that the leadership is looking at the original intent, and then updating it as the market demands and also as the environments have shifted,” Pinkerton says. “I think that’s a really healthy thing to do.” Part of her new job as co-director will be helping navigate those changes and continuing to make sure the common platforms Honda and OSU are working on remain consistent with that leadership, she says. How to reach: The Honda-OSU Partnership, (614) 688-8574 |
Matt McNair was named vice president of Economic and Corporate Engagement in October, and he is working with the Technology Commercialization Office and other university entities to centralize operations and streamline relationships.
“When you talk about corporate relations generally — not just focused on tech commercialization, but on a larger scale — a lot of universities across the country are in the same boat we are, where they’ve evolved to a point where there are a lot of people across campus doing it and it’s not very easy to access campus,” he says.
McNair believes OSU is ahead of many universities, but there’s plenty of work to do.
“One of the keys is having a single point of contact — and we’ve heard that from a number of corporate partners,” he says. “They don’t want to have to call multiple people on campus to solve different problems. They want to be able call one relationship manager to make their lives easier.”
It comes down to listening to a company’s needs and understanding its strategic direction in order to find where OSU can fill in the gaps and help solve problems.
The landscape isn’t going to get smaller, so part of the solution is to better track OSU’s internal activities. McNair says that they hear similar stories from their bigger corporate partners — it can be challenging to manage processes within a large organization.
They also want to improve faculty trust and increase the deal flow, he says. You want as many deals as possible because it’s not easy to pick winners and losers.
McNair cautions, however, that it takes time to get buy-in and implement changes.
“It’s still evolving,” he says. “We have an idea of what we think it should look like, but there are a lot of people on campus that are still working on this. You can’t just make that change overnight.”
Industry benefits
While the Technology Commercialization Office office seeks to create more single points of contact, that isn’t a new philosophy on some parts of campus.
David Emerling, an industry collaborations director at OSU, works in Detroit and acts as a one-stop shop for the automobile industry.
In Emerling’s experience, research isn’t the most valuable thing for industry partners. It’s developing a pipeline of talent because students are working on research projects and can become future employees.
But even so, companies need to see bottom line benefits in order to underwrite research.
“There’s no such thing as doing research for research’s sake anymore. It’s pretty much tied to a business case,” Emerling says.
The auto industry laid off engineers during the recession, so as the market recovers, the remaining engineers are focused on keeping up with production and putting out products to sell.
That has left a void on the research side, he says, which universities are filling.
If companies want to create sustainable relationships with a university partner, however, it takes more than just one person to be the conduit, Emerling says. The companies who do it well have a formal process.
“They handpick a handful of universities that they deem as their alliance schools or their partner schools,” he says. “They have a process in place that makes it so that not only do they engage on many levels with that university, but they have the infrastructure that allows their employees to engage also.”
These companies also generally have an executive champion and create a master agreement where the IP terms and engagement is pre-negotiated, Emerling says.
