Transferring Knowledge from Academia to the Companies: A New Method

Abstract

Collaboration between Academia and Industry must be considered as a path to innovation through the exchange of knowledge. Although this collaboration has existed for years by presenting and publishing together new methods in journals or conferences or through lectures or workshops taught by professionals with a focus on daily problems, differences in goals and timing are found as barriers for knowledge transfer. In an ideal scenario, this collaboration should lead to a win-to-win situation where companies increase competitiveness as it facilitates the integration and commercialization of new knowledge in their products, while Academia can obtain new research directions and additional financial power. In a real scenario, despite the efforts made to successfully carry out this transfer, there is still work to be done, since the literature shows that current methods used by Academia are not entirely working. In this chapter, the first section contains a review of published documentation that reflect the different practices that are being carried out for the transfer of knowledge between Academia and Industry to understand the current procedures for transferring knowledge, as well as the main channels used, and the barriers identified. The second section describes the new method or guide to facilitate this unidirectional knowledge transfer from Academia to Industry, especially when working with Emerging Materials and Technologies (EM&T). This method combines a Learning stage—to explain the fundamentals about the EM&Ts—and an Applying phase to explain specific strategies of how to come up with ideas to find new opportunities that link the emerging EM&T and the company’s product strategy.