He said these deals would benefit all players because:
The company would have access to cutting-edge research from some of the best scientific minds in the country.
The schools would get corporate money for research which would provide possibilities for both faculty and students and unprecedented opportunities to create new products for market.
Ohio would benefit from new, high-paying jobs that would help keep the most talented graduates in the state.
“Universities historically have not been easy to work with from a business standpoint,” Board of Regents Chancellor Eric D. Fingerhut said Thursday. Strickland and Attorney General Richard Cordray are working on a standing agreement between the University System of Ohio and P&G to hasten the creation of joint research projects. It will expand on a “master agreement” that the company developed with the University of Cincinnati five years ago.
Fingerhut said similar agreements likely will be drawn up for aerospace, automotive, energy and health-care companies.
Last year, P&G awarded Cincinnati contracts worth $1.2 million — more than the total for the first three years, said Sandra Degen, the university’s vice president of research. Overall, the arrangement has yielded 54 contracts worth more than $3.2 million in the past five years.
The agreement saves time and money by reducing lengthy contracts to concise, consistent documents, Degen said.
“We can now concentrate on the relationship we want to have with P&G and pursue exciting research opportunities without getting bogged down in negotiating the nitty-gritty terms of the contracts,” she said.
Degen cited P&G’s success with its Swiffer duster, which was developed after a discovery by Japanese university researchers that the electrostatic action in cloths with micro-pockets trap dirt. By having a master agreement in place, schools and companies will not have to continually re-evaluate the complex topics — such as confidentiality, fees and licenses, and who controls the rights to commercialize the research — that tend to slow the process down.
Fingerhut predicted that master agreements would reduce the time to negotiate a typical contract from up to 18 months to a matter of days or weeks.
A speedier process will allow companies to devote more time to developing products and services for the world’s consumers, said Jeffrey Weedman, P&G’s vice president for global business development.
Weedman said the company has had a long history with Ohio’s universities, and the new agreement will spur “even more breakthroughs.”
For one project, P&G and the University of Cincinnati created a simulation center where the company can design and test products virtually, said Professor Teik C. Lim, head of the school’s Mechanical Engineering Department.
Students work with faculty members and P&G’s research and development team, gaining valuable experience that can lead to jobs, Lim said.
“This is cutting-edge work on the frontier of science and technology, and if the state can create similar agreements with GE, Toyota, Honda and other companies, it can keep students here after graduation with new high-paying jobs,” he said.
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