Contrary to the myth about the difficulty or lack of university-company relationships regarding investment in collaborative research in Brazil, the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) proves in its performance indicators that it is at the same level of interactions as northern universities -American, normally highlighted as global examples of research interaction between the business and academic sectors.
This survey was presented by professor Carlos Henrique Brito Cruz from the “Gleb Wataghin” Institute of Physics (IFGW) at Unicamp, who was also rector of the University and scientific director of FAPESP, during the virtual debate table on the research relationship between the University and companies in Brazil and around the world, organized by Unicamp Innovation Agency within the scope of the celebrations of Inventors Award this year. In his mapping, Brito Cruz identified that the average university-business interaction in the United States resulted in an average of 8% of the total investment from the business sector received by the 20 main universities in the United States in 2016.
In the same year, more than 10% of Unicamp's research resources were the result of partnerships with companies, that is, if Unicamp were competing in the same ranking as the American companies, led by Duke University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT), it would rank sixth among the universities that sign the most collaborative projects with the business sector, ahead of institutions like Stanford and Berkeley.
“This debunks the myth that in Brazil there is little interaction between university and business, which on average, in the state of São Paulo, is greater than 10%. It doesn't mean it's good, but we have to understand that universities know how to interact with companies, now we need to scale up. At the Brazilian level, what I see to be a management problem is that most Brazilian universities do not carry out this monitoring. And if you don't have indicators, you can't improve.”, analyzed Brito Cruz about the different interaction scenarios.
The same position was also defended by professor Newton Frateschi, executive director of Inova Unicamp, who also made up the debate panel. “We see that many researchers or companies have the impression that it is difficult to establish university-company partnerships, but this does not hold up to the point where we present our indicators. Unicamp, for example, surpassed, for the second consecutive year, the mark of R$100 million invested by companies in its research in 2019.”, explained Frateschi about the Agency’s performance.
In addition to collaborative projects, the executive director highlighted that this university-company relationship also occurs in other important ways for society, such as the licensing of Unicamp technologies by companies and the creation of Unicamp daughter companies: “It is necessary to have a holistic and integrated view on the diversity of interactions to constantly strengthen the innovative ecosystem around Unicamp, such as promoting entrepreneurship among students and the community that can even generate spin-off companies from Unicamp.”, added Frateschi.
An example of a spin-off company, those startups created to explore a University technology, which emerged from this relationship fostered by Inova and which last year licensed a technology from the University's patent portfolio, is the startup Cognita Technology. The spin-off emerged after the founders participated in the Desafio Unicamp competition with technology nanoparticles made from cooking oils to combat cholesterol, developed during the doctoral research of Valéria Santos, co-founder of the startup, at the Faculty of Chemical Engineering (FEQ) and the Faculty of Food Engineering (FEA) at Unicamp.
“I like to highlight the research profile of all the founders to explain our history and also to share the vision of someone who was once on the research side and is now on the entrepreneurial side like me: I see Inova's support in our activities as fundamental. Inova helped us from writing the patent, to modeling the business during the Unicamp Challenge and then licensing the technology when we created the company.”, shared Santos about his experience in creating Cognita.
Currently, this Unicamp spin-off is evaluating how nanoparticles behave in food in terms of stability and sensory analysis in phase 2 of the Innovative Research in Small Business Program (PIPE) from FAPESP.
These and other experiences were shared in the webinar “Inventors Award: University-Company Relationship Culture”, which saw the participation of 162 people connected live and is now available in full on Inova Unicamp YouTube channel.
Published article originally on the Unicamp Innovation Agency website.
