Abstract:

University-industry cooperations in biotechnology have seen a rapid development in the recent years in Austria. This study pictures the development by presenting several anectotical cases starting in the mid-80ies until now. Early cases of biotechnological university-industry cooperations were scarce and often hampered by the lack of interest and support by the official authorities. Only about 15 years ago, several initiatives were started, that enabled a rapid development of fruitful cooperations between creativity-driven basic science and production/profit-driven industries. This was based on the foundation of novel organizations that supported researchers in getting into contact with potentially interested companies and that provided knowhow about intellectual property regulations, confidentiality agreements and contract establishment. However, industry was still rarely motivated to invest money for "early“ and risky projects, even if they obviously had great potential. This dilemma was solved by the introduction of public-funded legal entities that could fill the gap between early development and industrial engagement. Such organizations like the LDC (Lead Discovery Center), a subsidiary of Max-Planck Innovation and the Max Planck Society or competence centers like the ACBT (Austrian Centre of Biopharmaceutical Technology) and ACIB (Austrian Centre for Industrial Biotechnology) were founded to bring together basic science and industry at early stages of promising scientific discoveries. The success of this concept was mainly based on a generous public funding of university-industry cooperations, which overcame the reservation of companies to invest money in novel technologies and risky but promising projects. In the recent years this concept lead to several success stories resulting in unexpected breakthroughs that would not have been achieved if the forces of universities and industry had not been joined. Especially involved students profit from such cooperations as they get a professionally supervised, multi-centered and application-driven education preparing them perfectly for industrial careers – this case study shows that up to 90% of the students that perform their PhD-thesis in such projects are directly hired by the involved companies afterwards. Finally, the reputation, revenues and specific graduate outputs (increases of up to 100%) of the involved universities significantly profit from these successful cooperations with the industry.

Keywords:

University, creativity, innovation, industry, profit-driven, cooperations, biotechnology, competence centers, education, funding.