A research organisation in LinkedIn claimed excellent achievements collaborating with industry: researchers have solved ‘the problem’. I just happened to be talking with some colleagues who work for that industry in particular and they said ‘kind of’. Researchers did tackle the problem BUT stopped at a point it was convenient to publish journal articles. Industry are stuck on how to implement the outputs and solve the actual problem. Names withheld to avoid distractions.
This situation is much more common than one would suspect and there are multiple reasons for it. Research is expensive and time is often limited, research organisations have to keep on hustling for the next project so they can’t put the necessary time, researchers may not be aware of the complexity of the last part of the operational pipeline, industry may not have clearly communicated the requirements, people may have overestimated skills, some researchers may not care, etc. Whatever the reasons, the investment has not paid off, at least not fully, because the client cannot make the R&D work: the project failed.
I have played both sides: I have been researcher and also a client; sometimes in successful projects, other times in partial failures, with private money and with government money. There is something going for clearly specifying WHEN the project is a success: the operational pipeline will work this way (list of points) and with minimum intervention, so it is really operational. Now it is too late for this particular problem, so industry will have to fix the last bit of the pipeline.
