Why would we even want to cooperate ?
When I worked at Norut IT, I was involved in project acquisition.
This institute is
somewhere between the industry and the universities: an applied
research institute. On one side we need university partners, on the
other side we need partners in the industry. Finding partners was in
all cases difficult. Below is a list of excuses people used to avoid
cooperating with me/Norut. Suppose you approach sombeody with
Hello, I have
this problem and we would like to research this further:
1. Your proposal is not interesting
2. You are too expensive
3. You have a bad CV / Your company has a bad CV (
Interestingly it is always the worst CV which is taken)
5. Yes, extremely interesting; somebody else should have done that
6. No, we are in the same pool, cooperation with you might lessen our
changes for our pet-project.
7. No, but if you had called last month.
8. Are you involved in an EU project ?
9. Yes, somebody else (better and probably the best in the world)
already does this
(a) and thus we don't cooperate with you
10. Can you send me an abstract
(a) and then hear nothing
(b) find out it is used somewhere else
11. You cannot get money to do new things
12. What do you get out of this ?
13. Yes interesting, but we'll just use a PhD for that
(a) even if it ain't research
(b) even if the guy in question is not qualified
14. No, we already have expertise
15. No, we want to own the expertise
16. No, you have a bad reputation
17. A bad reputation actually carries far: No, we know somebody related to you
and we don't like _them_, so we don't want to talk to you (with friends like
these)
18. Interesting ! Want to do it for free ?
19. Sounds interesting ! Do you have money for us ?
20. Interesting but we don't have money
(a) Can you do it for 1% of the actual cost ?
(b) No, then we will silently ignore the problem
21. Why should we want to cooperate ? Leave me alone.
22. Very interesting, somebody else is already doing that.
