Expanding the Use of Statistical Methods in Industry through University-industry Partnerships

Because an individual’s views are inevitable shaped by his/her past experience, it may be helpful to summarize my background briefly so that members of this audience may interpret my comments in an appropriate manner. Although I have held a full-time appointment in an engineering department at a Canadian university for the past 31 years, I have also enjoyed full-time positions in industry and consulting activities with industry throughout my career. Like most statisticians in academe who operate both inside and outside the university setting, the personal benefits I have realized through these associations are many. First has been improvement in my performance as a teacher through: i) clearer understanding of needs of industry, thereby enabling me to provide more effective motivation for engineering students to learn statistics; and ii) exciting examples of current statistical challenges in industry, along with impressive successes and informative failures of applications (and misapplications) of statistical methods. My research efforts have also been enriched by an unending source of stimulating ideas arising from interactions and collaborations with technical experts in industry. It has been exciting, and a source of enormous intellectual stimulation, to observe regularly the bilateral benefits: i) improved product performance and process operation resulting from appropriate application and adaptation of statistical methods, and ii) demonstration of the limitations of some statistical procedures, leading to development of new approaches to some very challenging problems. A significant bonus has been the opportunity to work with a cadre of extremely interesting people. The uses of statistics and the roles of statisticians in industry have changed radically during the past thirty years. “Statistical thinking”, extending from from the executive suite to the shop floor, is now increasingly the norm in several large corporations. Thus the climate and need for effective partnerships between universities and industries have never been more promising.