Hello, and welcome back. Great to have you with us again. Additional funding, which we covered in the previous video, is not the only thing you need to think about when collaborating with private partners. And in this video, we'll go into the pros and cons you might want to consider beforehand. So, let's start with the pros. Partnerships with private partners offer a lot of additional knowledge, skills, insights and potentially, funding. And moreover, partnerships with the private sector may unlock significant infrastructural benefits. In the bio- and medical sector, especially the facilities of research and development departments, shorthand R&D, of some of these companies are just as impressive and indeed, sometimes simply outmatch the facilities of universities and academic medical centers. Working with R&D departments also ensures specialists knowledge of specific fields of inquiry and of proper procedures to get products to the market and having them vetted by the appropriate authorities. Think of, for example, the development of new drugs. Financial resources in these companies are often also incomparable to the modest funds available to most universities. Working together with private partners, moreover, may for many researches, hold the additional attraction of acquiring skills that could be useful for a career outside of academia that you may want to look further, at some point. For non-academic partners, working together with academics can be attractive because companies may tap into the insights of cutting-edge research at such institutions, universities for example, especially in fields that lay just beyond the focus or interests of the companies themselves. Also of interest is the ability to tap into the potential pool of hands-on experience. For example, for working with specialists from academic hospitals. Think of nurses, think of medical doctors. Their experience, their insight, may be very useful. These benefits have been acknowledged by numerous policy makers and various grand schemes from the European Commission, for example, now request collaboration between academic and non-academic private partners. There are naturally also some drawbacks. Whilst academics are interested primarily in generating new data, new insights, new ideas, the objective for most companies is to develop a product that makes, naturally, a profit, or at the very least, covers the costs of developing it. And whilst the resources of many large companies may be infinitely larger than those of universities, it should be borne in mind that the costs of developing can be mind-blowing, especially if one takes into account numerous and costly research trajectories that fails to deliver a suitable product. And this is especially relevant when working with pharmaceutical companies. Think of development of new drugs. But these are not the only potential problems one should consider when contacting potential partners. Other obstacles for commercial parties are such things as the costs of preparatory work. Writing grant applications, for example, is for companies and especially smaller ones, a costly activity. It takes a substantial investment in terms of time, and thus salary, often with a very poor outlook of success. The success rates for European funding for example, are generally below the 15%. As a result, companies often feel unable to participate in this important first step of a collaborative project. In order to mitigate these costs, companies typically demand ownership of all intellectual property that is generated by a project, and especially in the case of risky, likely to fail projects, may demand the rights to relevant preliminary work. In other words, everything that has already been developed by an academic in order to start this project, now is owned by a partner. Ownership of intellectual property can be a thorny issue and indeed, may have repercussions for an academic's ability to follow up on a specific research project. And even though he or she may have developed certain ideas and products, ownership to this intellectual property may have passed to partners or may be used only for very limited specific purposes. Because of these different outlooks and expectations, it is always advisable to involve a legal specialist in the creation of research consortia and the signing of contracts.