On the afternoon of April 8, Hou Chih-tsung, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at National Cheng Kung University, arrived at the Leadwell CNC Machines Manufacturing Corp. in the Taichung Industrial District. He wasn't looking for a part-time job.

He had made a special trip there to meet Ronny Chiang, head of the mechanical and design department, and discuss details of the plan to develop a "dual cam type automatic tool changer" that his department and the company are working on together.

Leadwell and Chung Kung have been working on the plan for over a year and expect that it will be ready for formal application in another two years. The new method will speed up the production process fourfold; whereas it takes seven or eight seconds to change a blade with a conventional machine, the new method will need just two. "If you could make one finished product an hour, now you'll be able to make four," says Ronny Chiang, who graduated in mechanical engineering from the university himself.

This is not the first time that Leadwell has engaged on a joint project with academia. Two years ago it worked with Cheng Kung University in designing a new plastic injection machine, and it has been filled with confidence ever since.

When executive meets professor: The mainstay of Taiwan's economy is small and medium-sized businesses. Due to limitations of scale and the wide range of fields they are engaged in, they have never managed to spend much on research and development. According to the National Science Council, Taiwan businesses in 1989 invested just 0.8 percent of their operating revenues in R&D, far behind the figures for the United States and Japan. The R&D investment ratio of our private and government sectors is also lower than that of South Korea.

To help businesses become more independent technologically, the National Science Council launched an initiative in January called Methods to Encourage Cooperation Between Business and Academia, which offers research grants and subsidies to companies and academic institutions that cooperate in the research and development of technology. Fifty-two programs are involved so far. Quite a few of them were set up before the initiative started by firms that urgently needed to upgrade their technology.

I Chin Machinery Co., which makes textile machines and has been working with the mechanical engineering department at Cheng Kung in developing a variable lead screw for use in shuttleless textile machines, applied for a grant only after they had been working together for a year. The variable lead screw that they are developing will speed up textile machine operations by 50 percent, shrinking the gap that our textile industry has with the advanced countries of Western Europe from four years to two at one go. The plan is still three years away from completion, but "the investment has been worth every penny," says Lin Hua-ling, special asssistant to the firm's general manager.

Helping industry upgrade: Chou Yu-li, the head of Cheng Kung's graduate department of medical engineering, worked with the Ching Lu Footwear Co. in 1982 in a study that applied ergonomical engineering to shoe design. The plan, which was awarded a grant from the National Science Council, combined work in medicine, mechanics, computer science and other fields and set off a research trend in the shoe industry.

Says one businessman: "The way the industry used to work was to make a product just like the sample shown in the order. The shoe might look the same on the outside, but it didn't necessarily fit the shape of the foot."

Now that the research trend has caught on, the local shoe industry has captured many overseas awards and patents in shoe design. The air soles designed by one company, for instance, have earned a number of patents in the United States and been used in famous brand sports shoes like Nike.

From these and other examples, cooperation between industry and academia would seem to be "fine and dandy," but in fact, "the failure rate is still higher than the success rate." Chou Yu-li points out that business and academia belong to two completely different worlds and integrating the way they think is not easy. Professors are perfectionists, working slowly and deliberately, and they have to consider what the R&D process offers their students. Business executives are concrete, pragmatic and eager to see results. The differences between the two lie just there.

Lin Hua-ling indicates that professors have to learn all they can about a company's production system to understand what's going on and to do better research work, yet executives are often hung up on "commercial secrets" and unwilling to provide them with information. "This is a secret; that's a secret--how can you work with somebody like that?" Frankness and openness are essential prerequisites for business and academic cooperation, he believes.

But executives have difficult considerations of their own. In the information industry, for instance, competition is fierce, copying is easy and the companies all have a similar level of technology, so firms that cooperate with academic institutions have to proceed very carefully "to avoid leaking something by mistake," Lin says.

Academic R&D a real bargain: Of course, scholars have their own set of criteria in choosing who to work with to avoid impairing the quality of their teaching and research. They usually only take on plans that fall within the scope of their research or can be used as dissertation topics for their graduate students.

Yen Hung-sen, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cheng Kung University, says he doesn't consider working with a firm unless its plan could serve as a topic for research. "Seven masters students and six Ph.D. students of mine are involved in the joint programs we have with Leadwell, I Chin and other companies and are using their work as the topic of their dissertations," he says.

And businesses look favorably on professors having their graduate students take part in the programs. Says Ronny Chiang, who was a graduate student once himself: "Teachers and graduate students are an excellent bargain. If companies hired professional R&D experts instead, the costs would be a lot higher."

The companies usually look for a professor who has a foundation in research in the field they need for better results. An example is how Leadwell and I Chin picked Yen Hung-sen, an expert in machine construction, for their projects in mechanical design.

Both sides are adapting: But when professors keep a big stack of projects on hand to win grants for their students, they can't delve into them in much depth or provide much help to industry. "Professors each have their own areas of expertise, and that's the only way to work with companies to help them really grow," Ronny Chiang says, urging professors who plan to work with industry to establish themselves as an authority in a field of research first.

The way it works now, companies often hire scholars under the title of consultants first. That prevents them from being exposed to too many "commercial secrets" and enables the two sides to become familiar with each other's thinking and methods of operations before formally entering into a research plan. This sort of approach is particularly common in sensitive high-tech industries. The joint plan that Chi Chen, who used to head up the Institute of Electro-Optical Engineering at National Chiao Tung University, engaged in with the Hua Eng Wire and Cable Co. was carried out with just this method.

Knowledge is the mother of success: Hua Eng started preparing to produce optical fibers five years ago. The company's originally made conventional electric cable and copper wire and lacked the precision technology and expertise that optical fibers required. In the course of his R&D, Chi Chen encountered problems communicating with the workers at the factory.

In producing optical fiber, for instance, a layer of protective acrylic coating has to be added to the outside, fired on with ultraviolet rays in a special glass tube. Professor Chi was just about to perform the firing one time when he found out that a factory worker had switched the special glass tube with an ordinary one, making it impossible to carry out.

It turned out that the worker had noticed a bit of dirt on the tube and was trying to be helpful by changing it for a clean one. What he didn't realize is that the ultraviolet rays wouldn't have been affected by a bit of dirt. "The problem was insufficient knowledge," Professor Chi says. It was a problem he met with quite a bit during the three years he worked at the company. After a while, he brought in a pair of his students as assistants to serve as bridges of communication. "We ended up working together quite smoothly," he says.

"You can't lose with R&D," says Hsi Shih-chang, director of the Division of Planning and Evaluation at the National Science Council. "Even if you never come out with what you were after, you learn a lot in the process and you foster trained personnel." A favorite saying among Japanese executives goes, "There's no such thing as a failed research plan." Let's hope those words become proverbial in our business circles some day, too.

[Picture Caption]

Going it alone, industry has a hard time keeping up with the need to upgrade technology. The picture shows a Leadwell technician operating a machine tool.

Academia and industry working hand in hand on research and development.

Academia and industry working hand in hand on research and development.