Robert Crawford, who since last November has been executive director responsible for business development and commercialisation at Glasgow Caledonian University, cites the example of Bolt Baranek & Newman to illustrate Scottish universities’ traditional disdain for commerce.
In the 1980s, BBN, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based consultancy whose innovations include the modem, the parallel supercomputer, e-mail and the precursor to the internet, was thinking of setting up a research facility in Edinburgh.
However Mr Crawford, then working for Locate in Scotland, part of Scottish Enterprise’s predecessor body the SDA, was unable to persuade anyone from Edinburgh University even to meet the American-based techies. “At the time, many people in the universities regarded people in business as if they were lepers,” he says. “They had very little understanding of what business was about.”
Although Mr Crawford recognises that there has been a sea change since then, he still believes relations between academia and industry tend to be fraught with difficulty. In part, he says, this is because of a lack of trust and suspicions of each other’s motives. “Businesses often believe they can get research out of the universities on the cheap, while the universities are often reluctant to surrender their intellectual property at all,” he says.
This is one reason why Mr Crawford, a former chief executive of Scottish Enterprise, instead advocates a more multi-layered approach to collaboration between the universities and their local economies.
“It’s not just about getting technology out of the university and into business,” he says. “It’s also about skills investment, management training, marketing and the application of new processes. But the key is harnessing the sheer underutilised potential within this university, and linking it even more closely to the business base.”
It is an approach which, to an extent, is born out of pragmatism. Glasgow Caledonian University — formed from the 1993 merger of The Queen’s College and Glasgow Polytechnic — has traditionally focused on vocational training and skills including electrical engineering and domestic science.
Mr Crawford recognises the university would be on a hiding to nothing if it sought to compete in the commercialisation and spin-out stakes with Scotland’s three or four world-leading research-based universities. “What we do have, however, is a great deal of practical operational expertise which is what I’m trying to make available to business.”
In particular Mr Crawford believes that Glasgow Caledonian has some practical, applicable knowledge in the fields of engineering, waste-management, environmental, and certain areas of life sciences (such as carbohydrate technology in food and drink processing) which businesses in the region ought to be able to put to good use. He also points out that Glasgow Caledonian has a strong health school with expertise in nursing, physiotherapy and the vision sciences.
He believes the approach should bring a triple benefit. First, it should enable the university to boost its revenues. Second it should fuel economic growth. And finally Mr Crawford believes that forging closer bonds with the business community will help Glasgow Caledonian University to ensure its courses stay relevant.
“What we’re aiming to do is focus on practical ways of helping business to grow more quickly. For their part, I believe that businesses should be making much more of an effort to interrogate us about what we have to offer. They’ll often find they are surprised at what they can find.”
Mr Crawford believes policymakers would be wrong to focus on commercialisation and spin-outs that may be to the detriment of other forms of collaboration between academia and industry. “To expect the Scottish economy to be transformed through spin-outs alone would be extremely naive,” he says. “At best, they have a marginal impact. Businesses can plug themselves into universities in so many other exciting ways.”
This article was published in the FT Report – Doing Business in Scotland, published with the Financial Times on 20 September 2007