University–industry engagement: The formation of the Knowledge Integration Community (KIC) model at the Cambridge-MIT Institute
Introduction
The intensifying technology race is compelling countries to search for more effective ways of harnessing research done in elite institutions for commercial purposes. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has proven to be remarkably successful in collaborating with industry and in developing a two-way flow of knowledge that helps to guide and augment university-based research and also facilitates the flow of technology, codified as well as tacit, from the university to the business sector. In order to refine the MIT approach and to transplant it to the UK, the British government in 2000 created the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) and is using it as a vehicle to launch a Knowledge Integration Community (KIC) model to enhance the fruitfulness of university–industry links (UILs). The purpose of this paper is to show how the KIC model offers a comprehensive and effective approach to knowledge sharing and to present the results from one of the first projects launched by CMI.
CMI was established in 2000 by the UK government to develop and implement innovative approaches for knowledge exchange (KE)1 between the academic and industry sectors, thereby fulfilling its mission of enhancing competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship. It is an alliance between Cambridge University and MIT, which was funded with a grant of £65.1 m from Her Majesty's Treasury (HM Treasury or HMT), plus £16 m in additional funding from the UK private sector. The initial grant from HM Treasury was managed by the Department of Trade and Industry (now the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform).
The multidirectional process referred to herein as ‘knowledge exchange’, which goes beyond traditional, unidirectional ‘knowledge transfer’ from academia to industry, lies at the core of the CMI mission. This multidirectional approach differentiates CMI from other organisations such as Research Councils and DTI initiatives that focus on one-way outbound technology transfer. In seeking to achieve its goal of creating and implementing innovative approaches to knowledge exchange, CMI is supported by Government to operate at the centre of an alliance of stakeholders from the Research, Education and Industry communities (see Fig. 1).
To achieve its major objective of embedding knowledge exchange into its activities, CMI is working with novel approaches for enabling knowledge exchange among the research, education, industrial and government sectors. The KIC model, discussed in this paper, is the most mature iteration of CMI's approach. These collaborative entities, comprising academic researchers and educators, industry participants and government policy makers, are brought together to identify and pursue joint solutions to common problems. These disparate groups, who would normally not have a common basis for interaction, collaborate under the platform of a KIC to develop a comprehensive and multifaceted solution addressing technological, economic and social issues. Other current CMI initiatives include specific education, commercialization, industry, regional and other projects. These activities are beyond the scope of this paper and are not addressed, except where they contribute to the KIC model.
Because the model we present here is conceptually intricate, our focus is on presenting a concrete example of how it works – a realistic perspective on CMI's experiment – rather than an all-encompassing study or a procedural manual for knowledge exchange. We have chosen to look hard at the formation and management processes rather than at numerous other issues surrounding university–industry interaction, such as intellectual property (IP) ownership and exploitation. This choice mirrors the focus of the interdisciplinary team at the time the model was created. CMI chose to let IP ownership and licensing be handled at the university level rather than setting up an alternate mechanism. We acknowledge the impacts of recent changes in UK law governing ownership of university-derived IP as an additional variable in our model, but for the present have left its study to others.
We illustrate the model with a modified case study that shows one example of its implementation: the Silent Aircraft Initiative (SAI). Our focus here is on the formation and start-up phase; when we gathered our data, the project had by no means reached a steady state. In subsequent studies we plan to present data on the full project lifecycle, and to that end CMI is gathering comprehensive survey data on a semi-annual basis that allows it to monitor this experiment on multiple levels, to evaluate its outcomes, and to optimise the model's efficacy for future iterations.
Section snippets
Literature review
MIT has a long-standing orientation towards the business community and has over time forged the culture of an entrepreneurial university which emphasizes patenting, licensing and other multistranded links with firms (Etzkowitz, 1994). The university has successfully created a ‘permeable’ organisation allowing companies to interact with faculty. It is argued that this was the result of unplanned bottom-up political and economic forces (Lecuyer, 1998); however, it arose from a complex
The model: CMI's Knowledge Integration Communities
Investing in Innovation, a white paper published by HMT shortly before the midpoint in CMI's history, noted: CMI is now starting to deliver tangible benefits to UK research and business. Although funded separately from the entrepreneurship activities developed in Science Enterprise Centres, the CMI is increasingly integrated into this UK network to deliver wider benefits beyond the Cambridge-MIT axis. The Government as a major investor (with business co-finance) will continue to require
The Silent Aircraft Initiative KIC
In this section we will examine the Silent Aircraft Initiative to evaluate the practical application of the KIC concept. Following CMI's 2003 call for proposals, the SAI was one of five proposals initially accepted for funding as a KIC. The SAI's stakeholders share a set of common problems related to aircraft noise. As its name suggests, the SAI's research outcomes are aimed to create a next-generation aircraft with significantly lowered noise levels.
Outcomes
In this subsection we will map the four human and two theoretical bases of the KIC model to the experience of the SAI participants since 2003. These six factors are described at more length in the subsection entitled “The Model: CMI's Knowledge Integration Communities”. The SAI KIC has developed all six components, and these are depicted graphically in Fig. 5.
Lessons learnt to date
CMI's KIC model is a unique experiment in terms of its all-encompassing structure, its international academic alliance, the participation of multiple stakeholders from research, education, industry and government, and its emphasis on knowledge exchange mechanisms and the continuous assessment and improvement of these mechanisms. The KICs had been operational for just over a year at the time data for this paper were assembled, and key lessons from their activities are only now beginning to
Future directions
The existing KIC programmes have now come through the start-up period and entered the development phase. The research projects are underway and the communities have grown to include many new academic and industry partners that have joined since inception. The Silent Aircraft Initiative has generated six iterations of a quiet aircraft, in addition to more short- and medium-term outputs. Key lessons from the ongoing programmes are being documented and new tasks have been identified for the near
Acknowledgements
This paper was prepared for the World Bank project on University–Industry Linkages in Europe and North America. The author would like to acknowledge the Cambridge-MIT Institute for providing resources for preparing this document. The author would particularly like to thank Dr. Siddhartha Ghose for major contributions to the paper. Also Paul Collins, KIC Manager for the Silent Aircraft Initiative, for his deep insight into the programme, Laurene Sorensen for her invaluable editing of the paper,
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