Blog: Industry and academia, mind the gap

How often do the worlds of industry and academia collide? Not enough, is mostly the answer. But if the two sides do not communicate effectively, how can academic institutions ensure that they are working on research and innovation projects that have relevance and meaning for industry; and how can industry ever hope to explain the challenges it is facing and the solutions it hopes for?

“Engagement and partnership between industry and research is so important; we need to build partnerships to increase the amount of research and to make that research more relevant,” says Simon Barnes, funding and partnership manager at the University of Kent. He took up his role two-and-a-half years ago, with a strong focus on the Government’s Industrial Strategy and its four grand challenges: clean growth, future mobility, data and AI, and healthy ageing. All of these have relevance to the sector – including ‘healthy ageing’, in terms of developing lifetime skills, leisure and exercise in the marine environment, and making jobs safe.

The process Simon embarked on also happened to bring him full circle in a career which began with a degree in international transport at the University of Cardiff and a year working at the Port of Dover.

Simon, whose career has also included working for the Society of Maritime Industries (SMI), says: “I looked at the Industrial Strategy challenges, analysed what research interests we have in the university and what is happening in the wider region, and then worked on the development of a number of key industrial clusters; logistics and maritime is one of those.

“Kent is surrounded by the sea on three sides, 11,000 trucks a day pass through Kent on their way to the Port of Dover as well as other crossing points, and we have a fantastic maritime heritage in Chatham. But I discovered that, despite the prevalence of us as a maritime region, there was no relevant cluster in the South East.”

The Maritime 2050 report provided the inspiration he needed as he began to work on identifying the various maritime sectors in within the boundaries of the South East Local Enterprise Partnership (SELEP), which covers Essex, Kent and East Sussex.

The aim was to outline the scale and extent of the maritime economy in the South East, in order to write a report highlighting the maritime economy in the region as the basis for the development of a Maritime UK maritime cluster which can support the national and local Industrial Strategy and also encourage and facilitate collaboration between academia and industry.

“No one had really pulled together that information for Kent, Essex, the Thames and East Sussex in one place,” he says. “Between 20 and 25% of the UK’s maritime activity is in this region, so we need our voice to be heard.”

This year, Simon was asked to write a national report on the maritime sector’s reaction and response to Covid-19, and give evidence to the DfT. “The maritime sector is highly fragmented and has suffered from that,” he says. “Maritime UK is doing a fantastic job in bringing it all together – but actually, the Covid-19 emergency has helped to raise the profile of the maritime sector, identify the challenges it faces and demonstrate the amazing resilience that it has.”

How does his role fit into all of this? “A major part of my job is facilitation and collaboration. There is a need for people like me in universities and other educational places who can share their industry knowledge and pull out the research capability within the academic environment,” he says. “There have been many attempts to bridge this gap but universities tend to recruit internally first. It is important that organisations like Maritime UK have a strategy to deal with what can be an ‘echo chamber’ issue in universities and education.

“I am trying to create the supporting mechanism between the Industrial Strategy, Maritime 2050 and the role of research and innovation. The idea is that I start these discussions between industry and academia. It is all about doing research with a horizon toward application, which supports industry.”

The structure of the South East maritime cluster will be formalised in 2021 and is expected to feature working groups looking at different projects and issues cutting across sectors and businesses.

There have been discussions with the ‘U9’ group of nine higher education institutes (including the University of Kent) within the SELEP region, focusing on how they can better use their particular specialisations to work in partnership with industry. “All nine universities in the region engage in teaching and research related to marine, maritime, transport and logistics subject areas, as well as supporting subjects of energy, communications and security,” says Simon. Those topics range from marine biology, pollution, environment and ecology through to maritime security, insurance, law and economics.

“The cluster will create a forum for discussion of really important topics. We also hope to share knowledge and experience with other regions’ maritime clusters, so that if one region has a specific focus or specialisation, that can be maximised.”

Clean maritime and the role of the maritime sector in decarbonisation is a good example, says Simon. “As other sectors decarbonise, the maritime percentage of emissions will increase significantly – there are real challenges here. No one operator can do this on their own, and there are clear opportunities to bring together research and technology – for example, technical research into fuels such as hydrogen and ammonia, and work on floating offshore and tidal energy. Decarbonisation involves technical, regulatory and business-related challenges, so this is an area where a collaborative programme of work is needed.”

Other sectors – automotive, for example – have been very successful in crossing the industry-academic divide in working to decarbonise, “and it is really time for the maritime sector to go this way,” says Simon.

“The UK has great opportunities to lead here, particularly with the IMO being based in London. But we are also looking to work with universities around the world to see how there might be joint research. Often solving a problem involves more than two technologies. We need international collaboration and discussion with industry to see what can be achieved.”

All four grand challenges of the Industrial Strategy have relevance to the sector – and that includes ‘healthy ageing’, in terms of developing lifetime skills, leisure and exercise in the marine environment, and making jobs safe.

Among the key priorities set out in Maritime UK’s Maritime Sector Recovery Plan, written in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, is innovation and the need to ‘foster increased levels of research and innovation to respond to the significant challenges and opportunities the global maritime sector faces’.

As the Recovery Plan points out, collaborative efforts are made to realise the total value of expertise and capacity across the entire sector through the UK-wide research and innovation vehicle MarRI-UK, based at the University of Strathclyde. Simon’s work dovetails exactly with these aims.

While academia must listen to industry, he also says that industry must trust researchers to work with their data. “It is said that in the manufacturing industry, up to 99% of data goes unanalysed. We should be looking at how we can use AI to highlight, to look at patterns, to understand the role of human behaviour. There will be examples in the past where things have failed not because of technology but because of the way it was produced or introduced – human behaviour is an important element.”

The frequent gap between research and reality can be measured. Technical readiness levels (TRLs), used to estimate the maturity of technologies during a programme, are from 1 to 9. Simon says academic research generally leads to level 2-3, but industry requires level 7-8.

“We have to make sure research and innovation is taken to the next stage and that we are not doing research for research’s sake. What can academia do? What does industry want? In our new cluster, academic institutions and industry will all be part of the problem-solving conversations.”