Having companies based on campus can have career benefits for everyone, says Jana Capson-Watts.

Industry and academia have had a long, and often rocky relationship. Each referring to the other as “The Dark Side”. But it’s continuously improving, and now they’re moving in together: Companies are on campus.

In this podcast I speak to Jana Capson-Watts, associate director at The BioFrontiers Institute, a company based on campus at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also a co-author of a comment article in this week’s Nature University Special. And at the end, there’s a short piece from Geoff Marsh and the Nature podcast about cross-disciplinary research at universities.

The relationship between academia and industry started in the early 11th Century, when Europe first started establishing universities. Since then they have developed into the beacons of society, becoming a space for learning and discovery, for study and understanding, for scholarship. It’s walls have housed some of the most intelligent brains in the world and have seen some extraordinary things. But one thing was for sure: before the early 20th century, not much thought was given to collaborating with technology and industry.  Continue reading →