The Unfair Advantage at RIT: Sponsored Research Services

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The Unfair Advantage at RIT: Sponsored Research Services

An interview with RIT President Bill Destler and PAETEC ASG President Jack Baron

4/24/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

When Bill Destler was named president of Rochester Institute of Technology in March 2007, he summarized his vision for the Rochester, NY school this way: "Take advantage of your unfair advantages."

What he saw when he began looking around the campus, he recalled recently, was a lot of faculty with corporate experience and a lot of students doing applied work. That's when the nugget of an idea came to him: developing a program whereby corporate sponsors could hire the school to do research and development.

But unlike most such university programs around the country, this one has a few twists: First, the sponsoring company can keep the intellectual property developed in the course of the R&D work. Second, the pricing scheme is quite simple: $20,000 per quarter for every student and faculty member assigned to the research project. And, third, the legal fodder to set up the structure--forms, agreements, and contracts--are freely available on a public Web site.

In October 2007, shortly after he assumed the top post, Destler put together a small working group to establish the model he had in mind. In January 2008 the program launched as "Corporate R&D at RIT" and two months later had its first corporate sponsor: Rochester-based telecommunications firm PAETEC.

Recently, Destler and Jack Baron, president of PAETEC's Advanced Solutions Group, spoke to Campus Technology about the program.

Campus Technology What was the genesis for the partnership?

RIT President Bill Destler: RIT has been looking to try to take a leadership position in defining a new way for corporations and academic institutions to work together on research and development projects. We came up with this idea--what we're calling "Corporate R&D at RIT"--which I presented for the first time at an RIT board of trustees meeting. Arunas [A. Chesonis, PAETEC chairman and CEO] was at the meeting and said, "Sign us up!"

CT: Why was a new structure necessary?

Destler: For many reasons. For one, the attempts by university faculty researchers and researchers at companies to work together on topics of mutual interest have been stymied for many years in this country in large measure because the lawyers can never agree on the contract.

Almost inevitably the stumbling block is on who will own what. Companies aren't interested in spending their corporate cash funding research and development and then having to turn around and pay more money to license the technology they funded in the first place from the very university they worked with.