Demystifying academics to enhance university-business collaborations in environmental science

In countries globally there is intense political interest in fostering effective university-business collaborations, but there has been scant attention devoted to exactly how individual scientists' workload (ie specified tasks) and incentive structures (ie assessment criteria) may act as a key barrier to this. To investigate this an original, empirical dataset is derived from UK job specifications and promotion criteria, which distil universities' varied drivers into requirements upon academics. This reveals the nature of the severe challenge posed by a heavily time-constrained culture; specifically, a tension exists between opportunities presented by working with business and non-optional duties (eg administration, teaching). Thus, to justify the time to work with business, such work must inspire curiosity and facilitate future novel science in order to mitigate its conflict with the overriding imperative for academics to publish. It must also provide evidence of real-world changes (ie impact), and ideally other reportable outcomes (eg official status as a business' advisor), to feed back into the scientist's performance appraisals. Indicatively, amid 20-50 key duties, typical full-time scientists may be able to free up to 0.5 days/week for work with business. Thus specific, pragmatic actions, including short-term and time-efficient steps, are proposed in a'user guide'to help initiate and nurture a long-term collaboration between an early-to mid-career environmental scientist and a practitioner in the insurance sector. These actions are mapped back to a tailored typology of impact and newly-created representative set of appraisal criteria to explain how they may be effective, mutually …