Sources of Ideas for Applied University Research, and their Effect on the Application of Findings in Australian Industry

This paper investigates a number of projects to determine whether the findings of university research undertaken in response to industry's expressed needs were more likely to achieve industrial application than the findings of research which owed its origin to the ideas of university researchers. Seventeen research projects, pursued by chemical engineers and food technologists working in six Australian universities, have been examined. The progress of the findings has been measured against five stages in the process of industrial adoption. A statistical test of the ranking of all the projects suggests that, whereas there was no significant difference between progress made by university-initiated and industry-initiated projects overall, the industry-initiated projects made significantly more progress towards adoption than those initiated by universities and pursued without interaction with industry. The projects initiated by universities in which there was constant interaction with industry were all adopted. The number of cases studied is small and the sample is biased towards those with obvious potential for industrial application. Within these limitations, and with the awareness that innovation in industry depends on many variables, the evidence of these case studies suggests that close interaction between university researchers and industry may be more important than the sector in which research ideas arise in determining whether that research will find industrial application.