Scientific Partnerships Must Be Flexible, Experts Say
As part of his National Science Policy Study, Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-MI) chaired a March 11 House Science Committee hearing on successful scientific partnerships. The policy study is intended to develop an updated, coherent justification for prioritizing and funding federal R&D. This was the second in a series of hearings that will provide input for the study.
Changing times, budget constraints, and global competition have, as Science Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) stated, caused scientific cooperation to grow “in recent years as a way to leverage money and expertise among federal agencies, research universities, and industry.” The 1993 Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), which calls for federal agencies to implement performance plans and measure achievement, has also prompted agencies to look for mechanisms, such as partnering, to use resources more effectively. “There has been relatively little attention paid,” Ehlers noted, “to analyzing the relationship of the structure of these agreements with their success.” He hoped “by the end of the hearing to be able to identify the common elements of successful partnerships...and how performance measures for research can best be developed and used.”
Identifying items common to productive collaborations, however, proved difficult. The point emphasized most by all four witnesses was the need for flexible and differing partnership mechanisms to fit different circumstances. Both Charles Vest, president of MIT, and University of California at Berkeley professor David Mowery echoed an often-used comment on partnerships: “One size...does not fit all.” The fact that the U.S. led the world in successful partnering, they agreed, could largely be attributed to its pluralistic, competitive, flexible, and what Mowery termed “chaotic” system.
Mowery criticized the national labs’ CRADA process for its lack of adaptability, and said its emphasis on intellectual property rights “sometimes turned out to be an impediment.” He stressed the importance of a partnership’s ability to alter its agenda and even its goals in pursuit of efficiency. This had implications for the GPRA process, he warned; goals must be defined broadly enough to allow adjustability. Mowery urged a more comprehensive effort to gather data on collaborations and development of a “more flexible set of instruments and criteria to help determine which vehicle is most suited” to a given situation. He also questioned whether various legislation permitting and encouraging partnerships has been assessed for its usefulness and consistency.
The witnesses did cite a number of elements important to effective collaborations: partners should have a realistic understanding of each other’s goals, cultures and time scales, and must bring their own unique capabilities to the effort. The management system “must contain mechanisms for stopping good work” and reprioritizing resources, said former IBM vice president for research James McGroddy. If public funds are involved, insisted Harvard professor emeritus Lewis Branscomb, “the public benefits have to exceed private benefits” to individual firms. Ranking Minority Member George Brown (D-CA) urged the witnesses to continue their efforts to explain and clarify the political justification for federal collaborations. “It is an important prelude,” he said, to “trying to establish a base on which to provide a stronger financial commitment to R&D.”
