The Strength of the Academic Enterprise

The most relevant part for people here:

"...co-operation between the university and industry, however, is so much harder that it usually fails. We might even conclude that the effort is hopeless.

To begin with, there is the great difference in Buxton Index. For industry, the Buxton Index is less than 10, probably closer to 4 or 5, whereas for the academic scientist the Buxton Index is closer to, say, 50, for what you offer your students should last a lifetime, their lives, to be precise.

The second problem has to do with the openness, which is a hallmark of the university, whereas, like the guilds, industry tends to see its knowledge as trade secret. People have tried to find legal solutions for this dilemma, but I am afraid that such solutions only touch the surface: at a more profound level, either one of the parties forsakes its duty, or the co-operation collapses.

But the greatest limitation on the usefulness of co-operation between industry and academia is almost certainly that the two have completely different purposes. To quote Harvey Earl of GM: "General Motors is in business for only one reason. To make money. In order to do that we make cars. But if we could make money by making garbage cans, we would make garbage cans.". Some people might argue that they even tried to make money by making garbage. But the product is secondary; to quote Harvey Earl again: "Listen, I'd put smokestacks right in the middle of the sons of bitches if I thought I could sell more cars.". These quotations are from the fifties, but things have not changed that much. For instance, computing science has very convincingly shown that simplicity is a necessary precondition for reliability, but industry willfully complicates products so as to make them proprietary. The disgraceful state of affairs is fully revealed by the traditional disclaimer with which industrial software is sold."