Good and not so good practice in technology institutes: Case studies from the ceramic tile sector

The most dynamic cluster in the global ceramic tile industry is located around Castellón in the Valencia region, Spain. The Ceramics Technology Institute (Instituto de Tecnologia de Cerámica, ITC) plays a fundamental role for the competitiveness of the cluster. Many institutes of this kind have been set up with the mission of technology transfer to industry, and most of them struggle to come closer to companies. Why is ITC such a huge success?

First, there is a clear mission. The ITC sees its mission in the education of the university professionals, chemical scientists and chemistry engineers with a focus on industrial ceramics. In the words of the director of the ITC, "We see our students as future partners in joint research projects with companies in the future; they will be our links in the companies". Seeing students as future clients is not a usual perspective, and the results seem to confirm the success of this strategy in terms of close cooperation with local companies. About 500 university graduates (2% of sector workers) have entered the sector since 1987; 3,100 professionals attended 107 courses delivered since 1983.

Second, ITC has its main business focus quite clear: "our business is technology, to be developed in close cooperation with companies". The machinery is Italian, which led ITC to focus on process technology, development of raw material and frits/glazes. The local industry is qualified to specify the equipment variables necessary to adjust machines to the particularities of the Spanish production process characteristics. And it is accepted, even among prominent Italian manufactures, that Spanish product quality has reached world class standards.

The main lines of action are: natural and processed raw material; manufacturing process; finished product focused on innovations. The increasing number of development projects with companies shows the important role of ITC.

year	1991	1992	1993	1994	1995	1996	1997	1998	1999
number of projects	10	16	28	25	38	57	44	54	53
total project- revenue (US$)	399	635	812	877	942	1012	1099	1281	1442

ITC responses to companies’ demands are swift. When the sector understood that design should be subject of studying, ITC has started a group work. As it grew, ITC spun it off, thus creating ALICER. Although ITC offers continuous education for professionals, Castellon has its own vocational training center, were correspondent activities are concentrated, when necessary with support of ITC. Accordingly, there is no destructive competition among institutional service providers.

Third, ITC has managed to overcome the different perspectives of university and companies regarding time, deadlines, practical relevance of results and need of confidentiality. With the creation AICE, a non profit organization, it was possible to manage the cooperation with companies in a more "business oriented" way. ITC’s focus on cooperation with companies is paramount, and often the academic output of the center has to be put in second place when confidentiality conditions of contracts make publication of results impossible. Credibility is achieved with hard work and remarkable results, recognized by companies.

Were there no conflicts or shortage of budgets? Yes, plenty of the very normal conflics between the academic and the "real" world of technology in companies. This is the "everyday conflicts we have to manage", considered in right perspective when compared with the challenges the real world of companies face them with. In other words, ITC has an adequate, rather than a romantic, concept of university-industry interaction.

Another ceramic tile cluster is located in Santa Catarina, Brazil. In the mid-1990s, a Center for Ceramics Technology (CTC) was founded. It was modeled after ITC in Castellón and was supposed to offer testing and certification services to firms as well as conduct research projects with firms. One of the rationales of firms in demanding the foundation of the CTC was to achieve economies of scale in testing of inputs, and to have a local institution for technical certification of final products, thus saving time and money.

Even though this institution today is up and running, the effect is falling short of the expectations. This has to do with two conflicts which erupted or materialized in the creation of these offers. It is an experience which shows how a good idea can go badly wrong.

First, there is the way CTC was organized. It is administrated by SENAI. SENAI is the main organization in vocational training in Brazil, and it is administrated by the private sector, being part of the system of the state-level Federation of Industries. Yet it has a high degree of independence, and it is often perceived as a governmental institution by firms, a perception that reflects, among other things, the fact that SENAI schools are rarely run in a business-like manner. SENAI is financed via a levy paid by each industrial firm (1 % of the wage sum). But as formal employment is constantly decreasing, SENAI’s income is decreasing as well, and therefore the organization has been involved in efforts to secure survival for quite some time. In the case of Santa Catarina, this took the shape of upgrading. SENAI is phasing out what used to be its main task, namely apprenticeship training, and is creating course offers for short- and long-term courses at secondary and tertiary level which it is selling to firms. Furthermore, SENAI is setting-up technology centers in each of the main clusters, something that is even further away from its traditional mission. Managing these centers is pretty much based on learning-by-doing, and thus depends to a high degree on the individual characteristics of the director. Since it is not sure that a director of a SENAI school has frequently set his foot into a firm or worked there, it is a challenge for a director of a technology center to have a clear and updated notion of business management and the kind of demands a firm may have.

To make bad things worse, the CTC was not just run by SENAI but involved a partnership with the Materials Laboratory of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Florianópolis. While the engineering departments of UFSC have an excellent record in quality of training, their record in terms of cooperation with the private sector is anything but. So the CTC ended up with a double directorship - a SENAI person with no industry background, and an UFSC professor with no industry background, either, but strong academic aspirations. So rather than emulating the experience of Castellón’s ITC, the actors in the cluster managed to create exactly the opposite. Up to this day CTC suffers from lack of credibility with the firms. One element, which is not at all helpful, is the fact that there are hardly any full-time employees; even the current director is another person on loan from UFSC who spends at best three days per week at CTC. Most of the researchers are postgraduate and doctoral students financed with postgraduate scholarships, and for their personal career perspectives it is essential to achieve academic excellence, rather than selling services to firms or helping them in solving their everyday problems. Accordingly, interaction between ITC researchers and firms is complicated; just one of the minor problems involved in technological development work is the fact that what a CTC researcher perceives as a prototype appears as a rough sketch of a possible idea to a firm person.

Second, there is the position of the regional university, UNESC, and its relationship with CTC. It is important to know that UNESC is a private university, deriving its income mainly from the fees paid by students, so that offering courses which are locally in high demand is essential for the economic viability of the university. The curriculum of the ceramics technology course, which UNESC has offered since 1996, had originally been developed by SENAI, only to be transferred to UNESC after the intervention of one of the main cluster actors. One needs little creativity to imagine the kind of feelings SENAI/CTC had for the university afterwards, and it is not surprising that the relationship has been somewhat cool ever since.

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