BUT surely the difference between academia and industry is that they would say academia leans too much towards blue skies and doesn’t understand the corporate world.
Professor Rodger disagreed.
“In my role as vice principal, I live and breathe by KPIs (key performance indicators) and targets. Business plans are fundamental to the success of this endeavour, too.
“The interesting thing is that, when industry asked us to set this up, they were talking more blue skies than short-term problem-solving. This is encouraging. It acts as a differentiator between some funding programmes, such as the ITFs.
“We see ourselves as being complementary to ITF and strengthening their research agenda. We are looking at tomorrow’s technologies and I think that’s one of the benefits of brining in academics, but academics who map well on to the technical problems that industry is currently facing, or will face.
“We also see ourselves concentrating more on R&D than research, development and deployment, though it is difficult to draw hard lines between short and long term.
“The primary goal is tomorrow’s technologies and long-term research. That takes us into the areas of primary funding for NSRI. Although we’re looking for subscribing members and project funding from industry, an important facet of interfacing with academia is that we can bid for research-council funds. In the past, we’ve been in the position of going with one university, a group of academics and maybe one or two companies for research-council funding.
“We can now bid based on an agenda that is coming from industry in terms of long-term needs, together with a partnership between key universities and, potentially, a very large group of companies.
“This confluence of activity will fit very well on to the research councils’ agenda … for example, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has energy as one of its main key themes.
“And, with the Energy Technology Institute in place, plus the Technology Strategy Board, the fact is that these are the sort of agencies we want to be really connected with. It is important that we interact appropriately with these and with European and international funding agencies.”
An example in the Aberdeen University context is that it has a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. This enabled Aberdeen to bid successfully for US Department of Defense funds, which secured something like $4million. Aberdeen was able to bid with Carnegie Mellon and alongside IBM, Boeing and Honeywell.
In Prof Rodger’s opinion, a UK university on its own would not have been able to bid for such funds.
“That’s why you have to see this as an international effort, although we’re talking about a UK national institute,” said NSRI’s CEO.
“Many of the companies we’re dealing with are international anyway and would expect us to have an international perspective.”
Prof Rodger said that the Northern Research Partnership was assembling an academic capability able to handle both blue skies and shorter-term technology tasks.
One of the simplest ways of engagement is through doctoral research – PhDs. These amount to a three-year funding horizon rather than what many people might see as a blue-skies 10-year horizon. He said a significant amount could be generated through PhD research.
“From that point of view, I’ve been able to put 10 PhD students immediately into NSRI, and we’ll very shortly have all of them engaged.
“More are coming from the other universities. I put in 10 to pump-prime. I want to see this number grow across the piece. Aberdeen recently put out an advert for 100 new PhD studentships and I see many of these being tailored into the energy industry. Across the three universities, we can draw from a pool of 300 academics and 300 PhD students, many of which are currently engaged in energy research.”