Development of a Collaborative Research Partnership Between Academia and Industry: A Case Study

This paper presents a case study of a mutually beneficial, 18-month long industry and academia partnership engagement process to assist others in establishing similar relationships. The partnership highlighted began with a single, unfunded graduate class project for a team of six students. Within 18-months, the partnership grew to 45 classroom projects, senior project designs (including capstone projects), graduate theses and dissertations, collaborative vendor/student research, and student competitions. During the three years following the 18-month case study, the industry-academia partnership continued to grow and resulted in multiple industry-funded research projects led by university faculty. Lessons learned from the partnership include 10 research-based collaboration strategies ranging from short term, low cast classroom projects to high cost, long term funded programs as well as nine industry brand awareness strategies for recruiting via future employee pipelines within the university. These lessons also include 11 project engagement steps that faculty can use to grow future funding opportunities. These engagement steps range from focusing on recruiting the right contact and champion, understanding the sense of urgency in project execution, to sustaining long partnered collaborations. Furthermore, the case-study established the need for a "bilingual" contact to support the communication between industry and academia partners.