Expert Opinion on the Barriers to Communicating Excellent Research in Commercially Driven Design Projects

Effective university-industry collaboration has become a major focus for governments in recent years. Universities are increasingly expected to play a greater role in the innovation system and evidence their contribution to economic development. At the same time, the growth in research quality assessment exercises makes it imperative that the excellence of research conducted in commercially driven activities can be appropriately evaluated. This paper explores the challenge of reconciling commercially focused activity and research quality assessment in design. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirteen experts including representatives from the design discipline, other applied academic disciplines, research quality assessment leaders, and commercial designers. The interviews identified a number of barriers to demonstrating research excellence in commercially driven projects. These were classified as barriers resulting from: the nature of industry-academic relationships; the nature of the project; and the nature the research quality assessment. It is concluded that there is a need to build a simple, easily usable framework for assessing the research potential of commercially driven design projects from the outset to ensure that the appropriate processes are put in place to communicate research conducted within them. “[…] Today, the boundaries between basic and applied research are blurring, and more and more fundamental research is conducted in the context of application […]” (European Research Council, 2015); this can be seen as part of a move within the research environment toward increasing levels of applied output. About a third of scholarly submissions to the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) - a system used in the UK to assess research in higher education institutions - were non-standard outputs, including performance, composition, design, artifacts, exhibition, and digital or visual media (2014). Therefore, the need to evaluate non-standard academic outputs in any assessment of research quality is increasing. The process of understanding and disseminating research from non-traditional outputs is thus facing difficulties and one way to better understand the issue is to try and identify these difficulties.