Technology transfer: Academia to industry

Abstract

High quality and innovation are major selling points in the technology market. Continuous improvement of products and the introduction of completely new products are a day to day challenge that industry has to face to keep competitive in a dynamic market. Customers desire changes when new materials and technologies become available. Consequently, new production views such as the whole life cycle cost of a product become an issue in industry. Keeping up with these changes is difficult and the application of the most recent technologies in a sound and effective way is often not straight forward. Academia is one of the sources of novel and scientifically well founded technologies. Furthermore, academia has a rich pool of thoroughly tested methods, well educated students and professional academics to deliver these methods. Technology transfer between academia and industry, therefore, is a productive way to bridge the gap between 'mysterious' theory and 'plain' practice. Various aspects of this transfer are discussed in this chapter. The most recent technology of multi-objective optimization is introduced to illustrate the challenges that come along with the cooperation between academia and industry. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.