This is one of those conferences where so many things happen in parallel that you feel somewhat conflicted -- what am I missing? I chose to attend Deborah Radasch's "Project Management" workshop for the morning, where the chief topics were how to improve the interaction between universities and industry once a project exists.
The sessions had key folk from Boeing, Deere, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Agilent, Dow, DuPont, Pfizer, Weyerhauser, and many others. The consistent theme was that this is a major cultural mismatch, with radically different reward systems as well as goals, for most situations. The fact that anything useful emerges seemed at times to be remarkable.
The groups with the 'best track record' (or at least the best report to this group) invariably had some "translators" on the teams, folk with both academic and industry leadership history, who could intercept misunderstandings and translate them for the dichotomous groups trying to find common ground. How this happens and what to do to facilitate it, occupied part of the discussion but the laundry list of issues seemed to dwarf this particular point of view.
A second and somewhat less prominent theme, but one that I think had great merit for discussion, concerned "big science" vs. smaller projects. Everyone was of the mood that we're talking the smaller things here in UIDP, and most seemed okay with that. But when the other surfaced, it seemed to be like a giant hairball -- ugly, unbounded, even less tractable. And yes, some of the needs seem greatest there. Classic conundrum.
We reached no answers, but today's sessions might be more actionable. The discussions did seem cathartic for many, and perhaps we'll leave here with some useful next steps.
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