4.1. Potential Drawbacks to the Company The costs to the company of participation in research projects with universities include direct cash funding of the research, consumption of employee and management time as well as office space, equipment and other supplies devoted to the research. For empirical studies, the time of research participants maybe the greatest cost. The following are risk factors that add uncertainty to the costs and benefits these are listed starting with the most significant. Note that we enumerate risks to success of the project as a whole later in this section. 4.1.1. Different definitions of success Unless a project is very small and the company is purely expecting indirect benefits see Sect. 3), then the company will expect some concrete result that will ultimately impact their bottom line. Researchers, on the other hand usually have completely different motivations for participating, the main one being publishing results. This cultural conflict is explored in more detail by Zelkowitz et al. (This fundamental difference of interest can lead, in the worst case, to researchers not paying any attention to the needs of the company. Normally, with well- intentioned researchers, the impact is more subtle The researchers might be stressed about their thesis deadlines, paper deadlines or other academic requirements and give priority to them. Or the researchers might deviate from a project plan that interests the company because they find interesting side-problems that will more readily result in publishable results. This difference of interest is probably the biggest risk factor to companies, and thus must be carefully managed. In the Mitel-CSER project, this risk factor had a major impact – many graduate students wanted to direct their theses to topics that related to, but were not directly central to, the original project plan. The faculty member directing the project was also in the process of achieving tenure and so spent considerable time writing papers – sometimes leaving the project plan to languish at a lower priority for long periods.
