Industry and Higher Education

This article catalogues and discusses challenges to the Bayh–Dole Act from a perspective broader than the legal, industrial or academic. Because the act is a Congressional enactment placed in the federal patent law and the author served for many years as Chief Counsel of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Intellectual Property and worked on the 1984 amendments to the Bayh–Dole Act, the perspective here is a political one. The author asks for a celebration of the act's twenty-fifth anniversary, and issues a call to action for those engaged in technology transfer to defend it.

The Bayh–Dole Act has been remarkably successful in promoting the transfer of technology in the USA from federally funded research labs to the private sector. Although other governments are now looking to Bayh–Dole as a model, most of this interest has been limited to developed countries. This article examines the potential benefits of the Bayh–Dole framework for developing countries – both for local industries and to generate revenue for local non-profit research labs. It also proposes initiatives that the USA should undertake to help developing countries to establish the rules and institutional mechanisms necessary to promote technology transfer in their own countries.

The phenomenal growth achieved by the Indian IT industry in the last decade has become a global success story. Fuelled by the thousands of engineering graduate and postgraduate students emerging from the higher technical education system, it is on the verge of significant change. This paper examines the issues facing the Indian IT industry and makes a case for institutionalizing and sustaining educational innovation at the higher technical education level. It also examines in detail the challenges that lie in the way of achieving this objective and how some of these issues can be addressed in the long run.

This article reports on an empirical study of industry PhD students in the Swedish Graduate School for Applied IT and Software Engineering. The students were questioned in semi-structured interviews about their experiences of sharing their postgraduate studies between industrial and academic environments. The results from the first analysis indicate that there are considerable differences between companies in terms of their traditions and their propensity to take part in joint knowledge development with universities. Three types of company environment were identified in this context: (a) research-intense, (b) engineering and (c) consultancy. The focus of this study is on how the type of activity, the difference in time perspective between companies and universities, the competence of other company employees and the character of the thesis project affect the doctoral student's situation, identity, support and participation in knowledge development.

Business incubators play a critical role in economic regeneration through the development and support of new and sustainable enterprises. Many UK incubator projects are funded by the European Commission through the higher education sector. This study compares and contrasts six business incubation case studies and identifies significant criteria for successful operation and ongoing sustainability. A conceptual framework for a ‘ladder’ of business incubation, supporting new businesses through start-up and growth, is proposed as a guide to good practice. The findings clearly identify the need for key partnerships with public-sector and private-sector stakeholders to ensure incubator longevity.

Recent education policy in the UK has encouraged universities and industry to work in partnership as a means of improving the quality of student learning and preparing graduates to enter the workplace. Indeed, both the Lambert Review of Business–University Collaboration (Lambert, 2003) and the White Paper on The Future of Higher Education (DfES, 2003) highlight the need for collaboration and closer working relationships. This paper reports on the results of a research effort to assess the extent of university–industry collaboration in the UK's built environment sector and to measure the impact of such activity. The ‘Accelerating Change in Built Environment Education’ (ACBEE) initiative sought to identify the nature of engagement activities in the built environment and to formulate, evaluate and develop guidelines for best practice. Forty case studies of engagement were collected from the built environment sector using a standard template, and many sustained engagement activities and established collaborations were identified. The paper explains how these case studies were categorized and evaluated to develop an understanding of the nature of the different types of engagement. A framework was subsequently developed for the classification of the case studies. Finally, the paper considers how the quality of such engagement can be measured and proposes appropriate key performance indicators.