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ResearchScorecard's Mission Statement |
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In 2002, the US National Academy of Engineering commissioned the "Committee on the Impact of Academic Research on Industrial Performance".
A major recommendation of the Committee's report was to stimulate the academic community to find "...new ways of supporting personal interactions across academia-industry boundaries, including using technology to support collaboration" (p.231).
While completely independent from the Committee, ResearchScorecard is specifically informed by this subset of the Committee's recommendations:
- "cultivating interactions between academic and industry researchers".
- "harnessing academia's broad disciplinary base and potential for cross-disciplinary research and training to meet the needs of service businesses more effectively".
- "increasing the contribution of academic research to the management of information for private gain and/or public benefit in the information age".
More recommendations from the Committee:
Recommendation 32: Optimizing the contributions of university research will require creating effective linkages between faculty in engineering schools and faculty in medicine. The panel recommends that universities invest in interdisciplinary centers to generate new knowledge for advancing medical devices and to develop new diagnostic and therapeutic modalities. Universities are also encouraged to decrease barriers to conducting interdisciplinary research. Funding agencies should carefully evaluate new interdisciplinary programs and initiatives in biology/ medicine and engineering and encourage the growth of the most promising ones (p.105).
Recommendation 33: Universities and medical device firms should explore ways of creating more systematic partnerships between universities (especially academic medical centers) and industrial firms for the development and evaluation of new, cost-effective medical devices. Models worth contemplating include interdisciplinary centers for the development and evaluation of medical devices that include industrial partners, the sharing of expensive facilities (e. g., animal laboratories), exchange fellowships, and the teaching of joint courses. Moreover, the panel believes that both society and the medical device industry would benefit substantially if new indications of use could be identified sooner after the development of a device. To expedite the discovery of new indications, device manufacturers might draw more fully on interdisciplinary panels of academic experts who would consider how a new technological capability (e. g., lasers or positron emission tomography) that is useful for one purpose might also be useful (modified as necessary) in another field. (p.105).
ReferencesCommittee on the Impact of Academic Research on Industrial Performance. The Impact of Academic Research on Industrial Performance. Washington, DC, USA: National Academies Press, 2003.
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