Industry

Partnering with universities, by jointly applying for research grants, is a cost effective way for organisations to leverage R&D, develop specific new projects or explore blue sky opportunities.

Research grants may be obtained from governments, industry associations, international agencies or from philanthropic sources. However, these types of research support are competitive and not guaranteed to be funded.

Often the timeframes between conceiving an idea, writing the grant, receiving a grant and commencing the project can be quite long (e.g. 12-18 months), and if successful only 50-70% of the project costs will come from the grant itself. Grant funded research is typically conducted over a 3-5 year timeframe.

Research can be directly funded by an industry partner. It is generally applied research that directly addresses a need of the industry partner.

Directly-funded research can take the form of contract research or consulting projects.

In contrast to grant funded research, the time to conceive and commence a project may be less than one month and the funding non-competitive, and often not publicly announced.

Industry funded research is generally conducted over a shorter period of time, typically 6-24 months.

Student research projects are often the easiest mechanism to engage with a University to conduct research projects and encompass honours, masters and doctoral students.

The expense of running a student project is generally much less than for either an industry-funded research project or a grant-funded project, however, in-kind supervisory time is somewhat greater and the research outcomes are early stage.

These are generally groups of specialists that are required to provide guidance and advice for very specific activities. These may include an advisory board on how to market and promote the activities of C3 or assistance on the best way to engage with the industry globally.

Organisations that have an interest in participating are welcome to join a range of advisory roles that arise from time to time and vary in duration from one-off workshops to ongoing advisory roles.

These will be advertised on the C3 website, are non-executive roles, and most often unremunerated.