DuPont's commitment to research partnerships

Mr Leo Hyde, DuPont Australia's Research and Development Manager, outlined what he sees as some of the basics of a good relationship between a private company and public research institutions and provided examples of his company's successful relationships with two Australian research providers.

DuPont sees itself as a business looking for growth based on 10 areas of core competence: chemical science and catalysis; polymer synthesis and science; coatings; fibre technology; imaging applications; plant science; petroleum technology; manufacturing technologies; modelling and simulation; and biotechnology, which is still classed as an emerging competency. In 1995 it had revenues of $42.2 billion, net revenue of $3.3 billion and spent about $1 billion on research. It maintains 80 customer service and R&D laboratories, 20 of which are outside the USA. Its global activities map does not show R&D being done by the company in Australia, but it has developed good working relationships with a number of Australian research institutions.

Out of its billion-dollar annual R&D budget, DuPont is moving to spend some $120 million with outside organisations.

The company has a two-way technology transfer mission: identifying and acquiring the technologies needed to achieve the strategic intent of DuPont's business; and licensing or selling underutilised resources. The group has outlicensed 800 patents in the last two years. Of the two tactics it uses to acquire the technologies ­ outright purchase and joint development ­ the latter in a partnership environment has produced the best results so far.

The group has moved to joint development of technologies because it has decided that, despite its considerable cost, an exclusively internal R&D strategy risks cutting it off from considerable banks of useful expertise outside the company. We have come to the conclusion that we get better technology through collaboration.

The critical success factors in the process of technology transfer are: management commitment; commitment from the researchers and funding for them; a clear knowledge of what the research aims to find; focused contact personnel; overlaps in core competencies between the company and the researchers; maintaining a strategic perspective over multiple interactions; efficient processes for following up leads; and the establishment of partnerships.

Trust is the key to making things work. If you feel uncomfortable with the person you are talking to, walk away, because the partnership will fail. There are nevertheless barriers to be overcome, such as intellectual property issues, technology security and the not-invented-here attitude on the part of DuPont ­ an inevitable overhang from its past.

Successes the company has recorded to date cover the fields of agricultural products, new refrigerants, catalytic processes, polymer technology, and medical products.

Our technology transfer approach is that we will deal with any credible source worldwide, but we prefer proven technology partners who do business the way we like to; have expertise in that area of interest; are willing to compete with other competent sources and are easy to work with in that they are focused in their contacts, provide quick, honest responses, and are prepared for strategic commitment.

We need the sort of relationship where, if an outside lab has offered us a process and my people find it has shortcomings, I can tell the researchers plainly, 'This is not an industrial process. Go back to the lab and get rid of this, this, this and this.' Then four, five, six weeks later, out pops a real industrial process.

We have two local success stories, which exemplify many of the features I have talked about: the company's relationship with Sydney University, consulting on specific projects and an industrial research and development grant project; and with the CSIRO on a strategic alliance catalyst venture which featured a process scale-up with GIRD financing.