In Feature’s today David Myton report on this year’s Business Higher Education Round Table award winners.

With the government’s committing to the transformative power of its new impact and engagement metrics the BEHERT achievers are an intriguing mix, demonstrating the power of relationships over rhetoric.

Relationships like that between the University of Western Australia and Chevron, which BHERT CEO Peter Binks says is based on a mutual commitment by senior staff at both. It demonstrates how convenient claims on both sides of the industry-academy divide are plain wrong in the case of campuses and companies which have long term relationships. “BHERT company members understand the challenges universities are going through and the unis understand the challenges and are developing skills.”

But to bridge the divides that do exist Dr Binks says we should consider the contrast between Australia and Canada. Here, most new PhDs want to work in universities, while close to 70 per cent of Canadians are in industry. Dr Binks own career makes the point, a theoretical physicist by training he has worked in research roles for McKinsey, BHP, Telstra and on a nanotech launch. “I admire entrepreneurs who go from start-up to scale-up,” he says.

The challenge for BHERT, he adds, is to match the existing success of alliances between business and university in established Australian industries, agriculture, minerals, energy, for example, with emerging research and product/service development, in artificial intelligence, health and medicine, for example. It is a task that appeals to his experience and inclinations; “I admire entrepreneurs who go from start-up to scale-up,” he says.