What are the things to keep in mind when either selling research data to universities or parntering up with universities to have them produce research based on your data?
If you can ignore the selling angle and go into the "partnering" area, I'd suggest looking at:
- established partnership programs (either area-local or industry specific), many institutes participate in those and might give you good local connections for the appropriate contacts
- approaching principal researchers in appropriate settings (e.g. conferences)
- Specific program partnerships, e.g. funding a research positions / take on Bachelor/Master thesis as an external advisor / or even offer student projects in cooperation with an appropriate course (at least here in Europe those are part of many programs and people actively look for industry cooperation sometimes).
- If you already have academia ties you could co-organize / sponsor a shared task in your domain, essentially giving out your data, providing a competition for a few challenging research questions. This would likely require partnership with a researcher that has done this before in order to be recognized by academia, otherwise it's just like any other Kaggle competition.
Disclaimer: Completely European perspective, all of those require investment from you instead of the other way around. I'm sure it works somewhat differently with for-profit universities over the pond.
What I was surprised about is that some large universities (in the States, at least) have dedicated data acquisition departments, which suggests they acquire data often enough to need a department for it.
Thanks for the rest of the advice.