My interviews with academic scientists and entrepreneurs revealed that they seemed to value personal relationships and network much more than IP. For example, a university professor described the importance of having contacts in commercialisation as follows:
I think the key issue in commercialisation is having contacts, or knowing someone with contacts, having contacts with good business people you know. . . It’s the people, the experienced people that counts and making it successful.
By contrast, technology transfer managers tended to focus on the contractual and pecuniary aspects of research commercialisation. This often brought them into conflict with academic scientists and entrepreneurs who perceived personal relationships and network as more important. For example, a professor expressed his discontent with his university’s contractual approach to research commercialisation:
It becomes very formal when you go through the university system and they are very risk averse and they are concerned about making sure the contracts. . . and they don’t really know about managing contracts, so it gets bogged down. I had another experience with helping somebody else here with trying to deal with a company that the university had set up and there were all kinds of problems, and I went through meetings, and it was all about the wording in the contracts and so on. . .
This professor believed that research commercialisation is more than a unidirectional transfer of IP from academia to industry. From his point of view, it involves an ecosystem of interactions. In illustrating his point, he said:
. . . there is this linear view that somehow it goes like that and ends up in a product, and what you need is a whole ecosystem of interactions that enable that. And there’s a lot of information of value both ways all the time, and we don’t have that.
The importance of personal relationships was further illustrated by another university scientist’s experience in research commercialisation. This respondent described that in the absence of his business partner’s relationships, he could not proceed to set up his own biotechnology company:
My friend knows some of the venture capitalists and he also knows some of the business development people. We were all lined up with meetings and things and we had a law firm doing pro bono on all the legal stuff and everything, and then, he got hit by a truck. It is very interesting because all of that depended on his relationships. Without him we wouldn’t get traction with these people. Because all his relationships were important.
Some scientists reported that their involvement in research commercialisation was typically initiated through their personal contacts and network. As scientists, they have often worked in a research field for a long time and become the experts in that specific area. Through publications and conferences, they not only developed their professional network, but also built their reputation within the scientific community. On many occasions, research commercialisation opportunities came to them directly because they were well known by others. For example, an immunologist from a medical research institute described how he got into research commercialisation through his contacts:
It usually starts through a network of contacts, because I have now done contract research for 20 companies all up. I have been going for 25 years. I am known out there so people know me and the building knows that I do contract research so when they are approached in conferences, I often get told and get phone calls. I have friends in those arenas as well. It’s personal contact mostly now.
In another example, a university professor explained how his personal relationships and professional network helped him to get involved into research commercialisation multiple times. He said:
The [company x] contact came through our reputation I suppose as people who make molecules, so they approached us. The [company y] connection arose because the new managing director, I had known from previous
collaborations with the company, and he rang me up and said, would you mind being a consultant for a little while and coming down and listening to what we are doing and critiquing that for us. In another case a company called xxx which you may know of — one of my former students happens to run the R&D component of xxx and he is using me as a consultant and we have a modest collaboration going on there at the moment, which is very enjoyable. In fact it is a repeat of some previous collaborations, which have been very successful. So it is a whole lot of slightly different mixes of reasons but I guess at the bottom line, it is being reasonably well networked both on one’s own campus and also just more generally within the community in Australia.
Another finding of this study is that scientists who were successful in commercialising their research actually regarded business people highly. They had a genuine respect for different sets of skills and enjoyed collaborating with industry people who were good at their jobs. A representative comment from a university scientist was:
I guess one of the things I did understand, I saw the value of people in the business disciplines if you like, because it was clear at that point xxx came to the job with a lot of knowledge which I didn’t have, and relatively good negotiation skills. Yes, I guess I started to appreciate and something that I appreciate more and more over the years, is that it takes a team of people with different sets of skills, whether it’s legal, financial or business development. I actually enjoyed the interaction with those people when they are open and collaborative and they are good at their job. . .
From an industry perspective, my interviews with entrepreneurs showed that they were very interested in building and maintaining relationships with scientists from government funded research labs. They frequently stressed the importance of having connections with academic scientists and the mutual benefits that could be gained through collaborative research. In illustrating this point, a CEO of a biotechnology company remarked:
I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve stayed pretty much in the same industry in the sense that the people I still interact with and get business from people I’ve known within that industry. Our collaborators. We collaborate, as I said, with UNSW, the Institute for Eye Research and the School of Optometry, Prince of Wales Hospital, Endocrinology, and Oncology Departments. We’ve got quite a lot of stuff out there and more recently with the nanotechnology people, who are in the. . . there is an ARC Centre there. So there’s I guess again connections there that we’ve had for a long time so there’s some advantage of also being in the same city that you were born in. It is very hard to want to leave it when it is like this.
In fact, some biotechnology companies were actively searching for new ideas from research institutions which might fit strategically with their R&D programs. They were interested in having access to different knowledge. Through interaction with academic scientists, they wanted to learn and to increase their research capability. For example, a chief technical officer described below that he used a variety of informal channels to look for interesting ideas:
Yes, I am sort of like the Chief Technical Officer now. I very much travel for sort of the first month of the year, so I am about to go on a big trip and just try to meet some new people and go to a few shows and conferences, and then do a bit of a roundup of the university again, see who I can meet, see if there is anything new and then try and just drive home the projects for the rest of the year to make sure we meet our goals.
A number of existing studies have also shown that personal relationships and network play an important role in research commercialisation (Perkmann & Walsh, 2007). Even in the biotechnology industry where university-generated IP is more important than in other sectors (Mansfield, 1995), firms seem to value interaction with university scientists through a number of social pathways where information, knowledge and other resources are exchanged or co-produced (Liebeskind, Oliver, Zucker, & Brewer, 1996).