I came back to UNSW from Microsoft in January, it’s been a very busy 7 months, catching up with some old colleagues, met lots of new people, clashing with lots of new organisational processes and culture, and most fun of all, doing research and looking at the world again with a good dosage of rigour and scepticism.

Many of my former industry colleagues asked me how one could go about engaging with academia/researchers, so I plan to share some of those discoveries here on this channel.

To start with, the Australian Government supports Industry and Academia Research through the ARC Linkage program – it’s the perfect thing if the collaboration is a research program spanning a number of years, and with excellent matching financial support from the oz Government, means that we could really tackle something that would otherwise be too high risk for the industry organisation to tackle alone. And of course – the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) model is another one, I happen to be a Research Program Leader for the Smart Services CRC here, in the area of Services Engineering, Services Aggregation and Cloud Computing, and it is another Government funding supported collaboration model that brings together industry and academic researchers.

For a more immediate response to research and industry collaboration, the UNSW Research Services is the best thing I’ve come across so far, but maybe there is room for something in between…

Perhaps it’s time for me to talk to David Jordan and figure out how we could better respond to collaboration opportunities in internet time. Might even have to spin up something myself! Drop me a line if you’ve a bright idea!