Balancing Industry Value Proposition and Researcher Academic Interests

Collaboration between academics, and between academics and industry partners, is fraught with dangers of parties not understanding what they value and what their value proposition may be. Successful engagement between research parties requires sensitivity in crafting the research questions, approach and outputs/outcomes to meet each party’s value proposition. This chapter explains, through two linked case study examples, how two senior researchers independently collaborated with an industry partner to co-generate value for all engaged parties. An example is presented of how research on one project by one of the researchers later led to unexpected positive research and published outcomes for the other researcher. Valuable business benefits were also delivered to the industry partner. We link our discussion to these two research projects as examples of what both researchers and the industry partner can achieve through a shared collaborative mindset, mutual trust and a willingness to focus on what each party valued as an outcome. This chapter illustrates how research careers may be crafted through collaboration.