Research consortia in the United States have proliferated over the past decade. By the beginning of 1992, over 250 consortia had registered with the U.S. Government under the National Cooperative Research Act (NCRA) of 1984. The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas, was one of the first consortia to register under the Act. This article describes my first-hand experience in heading up the function in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) Program--one of MCC's original four programs. While much has been written about MCC in the general and business press (1,2,3,4), and researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and the IC2 Institute have postulated several theories based on their extensive surveys and interviews with MCC staff and shareholders(5), this is one of the few papers describing MCC from an insider's perspective. In a recent article in Issues in Science and Technology (6), my associate Jack Bremer and I described five lessons that consortia must learn in the 1990s if they are to be successful. Those lessons are: 1. Maintain a coherent strategic vision. 2. Choose problems that have significant payoffs. 3. Optimize communication with members. 4. Make a continual process. 5. Strengthen membership commitment. While all five lessons are vital to consortium management and members, lessons 3 and 4 are particularly important if consortia are to realize the potential leverage that their supporters often cite. As I shall explain later, understanding these two challenges may lead to a new model of consortia for the 1990s that overcomes the shortcomings of earlier collaborative efforts. PREDICTED VS REAL PROBLEMS I have been involved with U.S. consortia (as a consultant, manager, strategic planner, or journalist) for over a decade, and have visited with officials of Japanese consortia, including the former director of the VLSI Program and administrators of the Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project, on three occasions. During this period, I have discussed the merits and drawbacks of consortia with technologists and managers in many organizations who were already members of consortia or considering participation. Originally, many observers predicted that consortia in the U.S. would fail for three reasons: 1. Competitors in domestic markets would not cooperate, even in the face of foreign competition supported by foreign-government-sponsored consortia. 2. The concept of pre-competitive research was too ill-defined, and would not result in meaningful results. 3. Consortia participants would not assign their best people to the venture, so the resulting would not be first-rate. While there is some truth to each of the above predictions, numerous examples from personal experience contradict those predictions. By and large, the competitor cooperation syndrome is a non-issue. Only when a participant's particular product line or manufacturing process comes into play, do competitive stresses emerge, and several successful mechanisms have been used to diffuse those pressures. Pre-competitive research, often called generic research, has been well understood for many years, and does not limit the usefulness of results so long as the is at least taken to the prototype stage. Finally, while it has been true that companies usually and understandably assign non-critical researchers to a consortium, company assignees in MCC's case made up only a small percentage of the overall staff (less than 15 percent as of mid-1990). If the above-postulated problems with consortia in the U.S. are red herrings, then what are the real problems? There are three: 1. The consortium, and especially its members, may treat technology transfer in too narrow a sense, leading to a situation in which the lies fallow after it becomes available to participants. …
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Jan 1, 2020
Open Access