Stimulating innovation: the challenges and benefits of academic-business collaborations
Running time: 9m 39s
Liette Lamonde, General Manager of Prompt, is pleased to welcome Pierre Majorique Léger and Sylvain Sénécal, co-directors of the Tech3Lab at HEC Montréal.
Discover the highlights of the interview:
(Liette) What are the advantages for you as researchers of working with industrial partners?
This is really crucial for us, because in our offices we can invent research questions and conduct studies, as university professors often do, in addition to teaching. However, having access to partners via programs like yours allows us to draw inspiration from their real-life, everyday problems. We can then formulate scientific research questions to address these problems, help them and train our students. Access to technology is also essential. We could have the best ideas in the world, but without the ability to test them, they would remain theoretical.
And this partnership with organizations also means being able to use their interfaces to advance knowledge, and being able to help these organizations advance their technology. So it’s really a win-win situation for society, for organizations, but also for science and students.
I’m sure there are a few challenges when it comes to partnerships like this. Would you like to share some of them with me?
We’ve been doing this together for several years now, and we quickly realized that agility is an essential quality. Companies are looking for quick answers, not in a year’s time, but as early as next week or next month. So, when we work with them, we make sure we’re agile in our process.
However, this doesn’t happen overnight. It’s crucial to understand their demands and expectations, and to ensure that our research process aligns with their deadlines. This requires a great deal of communication.
What is the impact of these projects?
Depending on the partner, the impact can be very significant. Take the example of the large organizations mentioned above: when a change affects their employees or customers, the repercussions are considerable. However, even for smaller companies, such as LRDG, a Montreal-based SME, the effects can be just as significant. LRDG has developed an application to measure cognitive readiness, as mentioned earlier.
They are currently in the clinical testing phase in the United States, with a view to bringing this application to the commercial market. The aim of our research project is to validate this application, a process we are carrying out with them on an ongoing basis. This enables this organization to take off with a very specific product, opening up new markets for future commercialization.
By the way, what motivates you to innovate, and what motivates you to do it?
Working with brilliant students and passionate colleagues inspires us every day. Also, the PROMPT partnership has funded a lot of things in the past, including the fact that we were able to create an Edx-based learning platform that is now used by 150,000 people worldwide, which really put us on the map in Montreal, and helps attract the best brains in the world to Montreal, from all over Canada, all over Quebec, to HEC. It’s this dynamic that motivates us.
