I have a new client and – accidentally, I guess – a new line of business.  It’s explaining to businesses how post-secondary institutions actually work and how to navigate their internal processes to arrive at better partnerships.  If you work at a university, that probably sounds strange to you, but trust me, it’s not half as strange as you all appear to the outside world. 

Put yourself in the shoes of a large-ish (but not huge) Canadian company, which is looking to work with a university.  Maybe not a specific university – quite possibly it doesn’t know exactly with whom it wants to work.  It may not even be able to articulate in detail what it wants from a relationship. 

It almost certainly wants to find talented new graduates to hire because there is a pretty significant labour market crunch.  Now you may say to yourself: “how is it possible that a company can get big and successful and not know how to hire?”  To which the answer is: most countries have a really good idea of how to hire in their own vertical.  For instance, mining companies know where to hire mining engineers, geologists, etc.  But they may not have an idea of where to hire for emerging skills in new technologies related to the vertical (where do we find drone operators?) and they definitely have no idea where to find the people who work outside the vertical but still make the business operate (especially with respect to finance, marketing and IT).  And apart from drifting from one career fair to another, few businesses have good ideas about how to solve this problem, and boy would they be happy if a few institutions could help them work on this.

What else?  Well, that same business might be very interested in working out certain forms of Work-Integrated Learning (WIL).  Capstone projects are a big deal here, because employers get an early look at graduating talent.  It probably wants to know if there are any innovative curriculum ideas floating around which might fill some niche staff need that is giving them trouble.  If it is a company with a scientific or technical basis (and, let’s face it, there are fewer of those in Canada than we’d all like), it might be interested in seeing if there are certain forms of applied research partnerships that might be mutually beneficial.  They might be curious about projects that are not just specifically good for them but good overall for the industry and help grow companies from whom it could eventually purchase goods and services (sticking with the mining industry: are there projects that would help develop talent in engaging Indigenous populations or improve environmental planning with a specific focus on the mining industry?).  And, maybe way down at the bottom of the list, there is the question of sponsorships and donations, as part of the corporate social responsibility portfolio.

Got all that?  Are you still in this business’ shoes?  Ok, now ask yourself, at your institution, if someone is interested in all that, who should they call?  Who at the institution can speak to these things?

Right.  Now you see the problem. 

Universities tend to put “outreach to industry” in three buckets: “can we find businesses to sit on our program advisory boards”?, “can we find businesses to partner with/fund our research”?, and “can we find businesses to give us money for broader non-research purposes”?  But the people in charge of these three buckets all report to different leads (usually the Provost, VP Research and VP Advancement, respectively) and they aren’t necessarily incentivized to work together.  Which branch of the university a business gets hold of is often random luck – who exchanges business cards at a convention or something like that.  So, it’s very easy for a business to end up dealing with the “wrong” part of an institution and having a bad experience.

Or they may just have a bad experience because they don’t understand the underlying politics of a multi-faculty institution.  For instance, the experience a company is likely to have with a Dean, who is focused on a very specific set of outcomes vs. the experience it is likely to have with a Vice-President or Provost, who has an interest in satisfying a broader range of constituencies, is quite different.  The solutions each suggest will be different, the speed at which each will move will be different, and as a result levels of satisfaction with the interaction will likely be different. 

I’m not saying universities are incapable of forming good partnerships with firms, because they do, all the time.  What I am saying is that institutional complexity makes the process of matching external partners to the right people inside institutions a lot harder than it needs to be.  For the biggest corporations (banks, mainly), it’s not really an issue because so many of their top people are on Boards of Governors and can hence get a lot of help navigating these mazes.  But for large but not-well-connected organizations this problem means partnerships take longer to form than they need to.  And for small and mid-size companies who don’t have the bandwidth to figure out how universities work, it’s probably a major barrier (and also a reason why institutions are a lot more attentive to the views of old, large companies, rather than emerging ones).

Solutions?  Well, the obvious one from the university side is a concierge service.  At a major university, what would probably make sense is a small office of 5-6 people, each with responsibility for a specific set of industries, to co-ordinate an institution’s outreach and response to business.  They would get to know the businesses that come through the door, understand their motivations, think about how to deepen these to mutual benefit over the long-term, and – above all – help them clarify their objective and steer them to the right people.  We have some good examples across the country of industrial liaison offices doing this kind of thing (I am thinking of UBC’s in particular), but nothing that necessarily brings the rest of the institution into the discussion.  It seems to me this would make an enormous difference.

And on the corporate side?  Well, as a I said, I have a new line of business.  Drop me a line.

I’m taking next week off, see you again on March 9th.  If you don’t see me back that day, please check your spam filters (automated spam-filters don’t adjust well to week-long sabbaticals).