Knovel

The EU RTD stresses the Europe 2020 objective that it “aims to support the development of a strong and sustainable industrial base able to innovate and compete globally”. University-industry partnerships should be sustained for inspiring up-to-date RTD, and industry-driven antecedences should be reinforced. The positioning by these authors had a solid accent on university-industry partnerships over the entire course of the ASCENT project to increase societal resilience to disasters. Collaboration appointments can appear in numerous forms and dimensions (career fairs, business advisors and affiliates, placements, conferences and meetings, project and university initiative support, program improvement, scholar fellowships, joint life cycle collaboration, RTD projects and product/service development). The forms and stages of partnership will fluctuate depending on the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of the environment. A founder of behavioral economics, Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman, asserts that two categories describe our thinking: fast thinking (first system) and slow thinking (second system). The foundation of the first system consists of emotions, impulses and exaggerated optimism. The first system does not require any great efforts; it operates practically automatically. Meanwhile the second thinking system is slow and analytical with an ability to control behavior and thoughts. Based on this idea, the author of this article developed the Neuro Multiple Criteria Analysis System for University-Industry Partnerships.

The Asian countries (Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bangladesh) in the ASCENT project have an unequally spread out and restricted RTD ability. An interactive and cooperative university - industry partnership can increase the quality of life and reduce the risk of disaster. Here the fields where universities consider the involvement of industry are recognized (e.g., fundamental and applied research, development, production life cycle and such). There is a recognized need for the private sector to engage the research community in the context of disaster resilience research to tackle disaster risk. The definition of “industry” in this research is deliberately vague to allow exploration of what useful collaborations “industries” can develop with universities for disaster management research (here collaborations mean different life cycle interactions). There is the need for an integrated multiple criteria decision analysis to mitigate the effects of disaster on the built environment at three levels: the micro (research and innovation performance, transfer and absorptive capacity, technology development), meso (institutional arrangements, communication network, local and indigenous rules) and macro (supply and demand, regulations, financing, taxes, culture, traditions, market, climate, political, demographic, technology) levels. Disaster management involves numerous aspects for consideration in addition to making economic, political and legal/regulatory decisions. These must include social, cultural, ethical, psychological, educational, environmental, provisional, technological, technical, organizational and managerial aspects. This research produced a model and a system for integrated analysis of the iterative life cycle of universityindustry partnerships. The model and the system make it possible to perform multi-variant design and multiple criteria assessment of alternative university-industry partnership life cycles, calculate their market and investment value.