WorkInHealth Career Fair: Best practices to bridge the gap between academia and industry in health

The main challenge for researchers is the cultural differences between academia and entrepreneurship, a challenge, Vicente acknowledged, that academia is fully aware of. Researchers looking to move need to find a balance between, and merge technical expertise, which are the focus in academia, and the soft skills needed for entrepreneurship, which is why it’s important to train people beyond technical knowledge to help them acquire these soft skill competencies.

Neil is a firm believer in learning by doing and creating experiences for his students that closely resembles what happens when they go into industry. He brings in multi-disciplinary teams of students from all disciplines across the university to work on challenges set by industry, so they get a good appreciation of teamwork and identify what the challenges are.

The students are usually solution-focused and very technical, so they tend to jump on a solution and try and implement it fast, but the university encourages them to park their solution and delve into what the problem is they are trying to address. This is done by talking to industry and using design-thinking to try and understand the problem from the person experiencing its viewpoint, which also helps the students develop a new set of soft skills.

Looking ahead to the challenges of tomorrow, AI doesn’t do empathy or really appreciate what the problem is. It will certainly help analyse and id where challenges are, look at patterns, ideate and come up with solutions. But what is the challenge? That’s the skill set students really need to develop.

Developing partnerships with industry, bringing industry challenges in and getting students to work on them is key to developing these skills for future students.

Karolina explained that Intel’s focus is IT, a sector which is highly competitive, and they are competing with other IT organisations for the most skilled and experienced talents.

However, the skill requirements can, and changing, rapidly and ongoing training and development is costly and time consuming, and most IT professionals seek out companies with challenging projects. This means that companies without these projects struggle to attract the right talent.

A good work-life balance is crucial for employee retention, especially with the changes the Covid pandemic brought to working life and the ability for hybrid and remote working. Companies that don’t offer this flexibility will lose out to companies that do, and yet tech companies are not seen as flexible enough.

The biggest challenge that many companies struggle with is the issue of diversity and inclusion. Supporting this is very important, because a diverse workforce can boost innovation and productivity.

Additionally, as tech is constantly evolving, it’s difficult for companies to know what is going to happen in the medium to long term. This is where collaboration with academia helps. By working together, they can help shape curricula so it’s aligned with industry needs and the latest tech, have guest lectures from relevant industry leaders, provide internships for students, and collaborate on research projects which can lead to big innovation.

In health specifically, data analytics is a huge opportunity to share data and understanding, and along with AI and machine learning, IT and health can work together to create viable solutions. After all an IT specialist can’t build an algorithm without a health specialist.

Ebba explained that research is important provide answers to challenges that will improve society and incubators good tool to help move this process forward.

However, a culture shift needs to happen when you move from research to start-up. The research community is very competitive with everyone striving to be the first to publish, but when you become a start-up you need to ask for help, you need to be open about where you are and the problems you’re facing, because the chances of someone taking your idea is very low. And it’s all about execution which is a big mental shift for a researcher.

Incubators are crucial to help this transition because they provide a structured environment for researchers to develop their business ideas, because while the discovery may be brilliant, you need to define the customer, the user, and the payors, which is a completely different and complex world from discovering a new and interesting molecule.

Incubators offer mentorship, funding opportunities, and networking events with peers, potential investors and industry partners, which is essential for start-ups; even though they may be many years away from launching, the earlier they start talking to industry, the earlier they can understand industry demands, current trends. There needs to be early dialogue to define their clinical and pre-clinical in a way that’s interesting to engage industry partners. And this is difficult, because most entrepreneurs in life sciences will not take their idea to market because of the immense costs that are involved, so it’s important to understand all of this.

Incubators play a very important role in the transition between academia and industry because they also offer training programmes in business development, marketing, financial management, and other areas that researchers lack experience.

Additionally, some incubators, like SmiLe, as well as running full incubator and other programs, provide full format discovery lab infrastructures, food science infrastructures, etc., because this is something that is often forgotten. For researchers to be able to move out of universities into entrepreneurship, not only do you have to think about the soft skills, business development and coaching, but also the specific infrastructure that they need, especially if they are wet-lab related companies. It will be impossible for them to go out and get funding for this in their first year because they will only be using this equipment for a very short time.

Ebba stressed three critical points:

• Inter-disciplinary knowledge, particularly the intersection with technology, IT data, and life science. Skills in understanding data analytics, AI, and machine learning and how this can be applied, not necessarily for them to develop their own skills but understanding when to call for it and who to collaborate with because these technologies are getting ever more integrated into all aspects of healthcare solutions and biotech.
• The importance of soft skills; leadership, communication, team building, adaptability, etc., because the healthcare landscape is moving, and the industry is very dynamic.
• Diversity in healthcare, when it comes to inclusion in trials, even in animal models, it’s important to think about the whole population, not just subsets

Vicente highlighted four key practices that should be used when creating partnerships:

1.       Trust and communication: It’s essential to share goals and expectations at the start so there are no misunderstanding or false expectations. By developing empathy with each other creates a win-win situation

2.       Mutual recognition and respect: It’s important to give space and credit to each other, because all parties are important. It’s equally important to be generous, while you can talk about the intellectual property of a product or paper, it’s better to simply celebrate successes

3.       Education is key: Bi-directional learning between long-term partnerships is vital to hear and understand each other’s pain points. If you don’t learn from each other you cannot progress, especially in a multi-disciplinary environment. It’s also important to be open-minded and offer common training programs to build the skills, knowledge, and feedback that keeps the loop of continuous improvement open

4.       Establish a long-term commitment to generate impact and value

Karolina explained that while Intel is a big tech business it’s not all about the money and building technology for the sake of technology. They are building technology for the benefit of humanity and the healthcare industries is a huge power when it comes to bringing people in Europe up to speed and making them healthy and strong

Intel has a lot of collaborations with academia and the most successful are based around big data and cloud technology. For example, Intel have worked with The Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, they were using wearable devices with Intel doing big data analytics to study the disease. The collaboration also involved a study where participants wore smart watches with Intel technology to collect data of their symptoms, this was then analysed for the team to gain insights into disease progression and help improve the measurement of Parkinson’s.

Another example was a collaboration with CancerCloud that has been built by the Cancer Institute, Massachusett’s Institute of Technology (MIT), and Harvard University. CancerCloud is a medical analytics platform that allows solutions to share and analyse large sets of patient clinical and medical data to tailor treatment for individual patients. This would not be possible if the data was not in the cloud or analysed by high performing computing, and it’s brining us closer to solutions to the biggest challenges that humanity has.

Neil’s advice is to do your homework which partner are you looking at, which tech company to identify a potential relationship. Collaborations come down to one thing, relationships. Look at the challenges they are facing, find out who to talk to, do you have the solutions and methodologies, or skill sets to help?

Build the relationship first, talking to them, asking to do guest talks, etc., take small steps before introducing the research. You don’t do a multi-million-pound research contract overnight, it takes time to build the trust and confidence needed to establish a long-lasting, successful relationship.

Neil explained that at the University of Galway they work with industry partners and provide educational programmes where the can recruit talent and they come in, they mentor, they give their time because they can see the potential future talent. That relationship has been built over time to the extent that industry partners are now sending staff to the university for training. But that’s another step in building the relationship, the next step would be asking to collaborate on research.

Start off with early wins, small little early wins to build up confidence and trust before asking for funding for projects, and there will be a lot of information sharing and time, it takes time.

The University of Galway values industry time more than dollars because they bring in expertise that the university doesn’t have access to, and industry perspectives that students love. It’s usually the first-time students have been able to speak to industry representatives and gives them great opportunity to put on their resume or say in a job interview: “We solved a problem for X, using design-thinking.” It’s really powerful and gives them confidence and the soft skills to get their first job.

It boils down to talent development, giving them the right skill set to get out there and get a really good job in a start-up or established company to add value.

Ebba agreed with other panellists that it overcoming the cultural differences is about communication and the small steps. Adding that in today’s world, where people rarely use the phone, it’s very difficult to get in touch with industry. This is where incubators and other intermediary structures are useful because they can help you build a network of contacts. For example, at SmiLe when a researcher or entrepreneur talks to them, they can introduce them to the right industry partner.

She does recommend the use intermediaries whose business it is to build networks. They can act as the bridge because it can be daunting as an individual to pick up the phone and call a multi-national corporation like Intel, for example. But because intermediaries are in constant contact with these types of organisations, they can act as support organisations for the researcher or entrepreneur. Additionally, they can sit in on meetings because researchers worry their research will be stolen and from the industry side, they are curious about what research is going on and what they should be thinking about for the future. An intermediary can help bridge the cultural gap in these conversations, making them less tense.

Ebba added that researchers should talk more to industry because there are so many mutual wins without anyone stealing anything, only collaboration.