Promoting the Success of US Industry/University Research Centres

Abstract

The industry/university (I/U) research centre, once a novelty on university campuses, has become the dominant vehicle for industry's funding of academic research in the USA. While the authors' recent volume, ‘Managing the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center’, documents a variety of skills and competencies needed to build and sustain these boundary-spanning organizations, none plays a more important role in centre success than leadership. Drawing on the literature on leadership and over fifteen years of experience with and research on the National Science Foundation's Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers programme, the authors define and illustrate leadership in the context of an I/U research centre. Leadership in a cooperative research centre often involves helping constituencies to deal with adaptive challenges, situations which require learning both to define the problem and to develop and implement a solution. Since these situations usually involve constituencies with conflicting values and priorities, they are typically best resolved by a participatory leadership style. Critical leadership challenges observed in cooperative research centres are discussed, including: exercising intrapreneurship, creating a compelling technical vision, spanning organizational boundaries, creating cooperative research teams, managing a changing centre and knowing oneself.