How Sony Interactive Entertainment leverages academic partnerships for innovation
In this week’s episode, we delve into the strategies shaping the future of gaming and technology with Lucy Hattersley, Academic Development Manager at Sony Interactive Entertainment. Lucy will share how Sony collaborates with universities to push the boundaries of research and innovation, and we’ll also touch on what to expect from the upcoming UIIN Forum in London on November 7th.
In this article, we summarise part of that conversation, but you can listen to the full interview in our podcast:
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Today, we’ll be exploring how strategic academic partnerships are driving technological innovation, and we’ll also touch on some key things that will come up in the upcoming UIIN Forum, Evaluating the Impact of Partnerships, that is happening on November 7th in London. This is an in-person event that will be really essential to anyone who’s interested in looking to deepen their understanding of building and measuring impactful collaborations between industry and academia.
And it is very generously hosted by our friends at Sony Interactive Entertainment, with speakers from our own UIIN, UCL, Matter Focus, as well as Lucy Hattersley. Lucy is Academic Development Manager at Sony Interactive Entertainment and Manager of their Academic Research Program in the UK, Europe, and the Australia and New Zealand.
In her role, she develops and manages these relationships with the academic community, forging connections with institutions and laboratories alike to foster cutting edge innovation and research for PlayStation. And prior to this, she also held roles in enterprise, at the University of Greenwich, and in publishing.
So Lucy, thank you so much for joining us today. I think We have a really interesting session lined up.
Lucy Hattersley:
Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to talk to you.
Madeline Arkins:
Great, Lucy, just to get us started, you have a really fascinating role at Sony, and I gave a brief overview in my introduction, but maybe you could start by telling us a little bit more about your role and how your journey led you to manage academic partnerships.
Lucy Hattersley:
Sure. I have been actually been in my role for two years. I currently synergise to a strategy in the Future Technologies Group, which is a business unit part of Sony Interactive Entertainment. What I synergise to, particularly, is that there are three foundational research themes that we are trying to accelerate and deliver, which is looking at what the future of gaming looks like in the next seven to 10 years, based on a Software Development Kit (SDK) platform engineering element.
So I work with those foundational role themes to then synergise with universities to look at what similar things that they might be focusing on or having academic strengths within. And we try and create relationships, or information and knowledge share between those institutions to help us understand each other better and ideally create projects that we can work together on a research level. I get to meet lots of different universities from all over the place and learn a lot about them. It is a really interesting role, which synergises from my background at the University of Greenwich.
Madeline Arkins:
And seven to 10 years is such a much longer time perspective than you would expect for industry, I would say. We always talk about how, in the work between university and industry, it is always industry that are a little bit more faster and iterative, so it is interesting to hear that you guys have a more long term perspective, perhaps.
Lucy Hattersley:
Yeah, it is very unique, especially, I think it is quite unique in the gaming industry. We have always had sort of shorter term goals the work has been shorter-term and mainly a different focus. But because we have these three different foundational things that are looking at how the landscapes are developing, what technologies are online and available now, and what possible applications there might be in different formats, we want to make sure that we have that ability to foresee that. We are looking at what can be developed and what it would look like in the future, hence the “Future Technologies Group”.
Madeline Arkins:
Hence the name. So, considering this forward-looking element, how do you view academic partnerships contributing to shaping this future of gaming and more broadly technology at Sony?
Lucy Hattersley:
We only see it strengthening it, to be honest. There is so much that we learn from reading anything in the academic world, from academic papers to conferences throughout the Sony Group. We are a business unit within Sony Interactive, but the group of Sony is huge itself and we all work in different ways, but for our group learns a lot from academic papers.
We have quite a mix of engineer profiles, from learning on the job, to write-up, to PhDs, so we have this really nice mixing pot internally and it starts lots of discussions, but there’s a lot of interest and excitement of how the different ways that can be applied when it comes to academia. To bring those theories and apply them in research experiments together is really exciting for us. We definitely see it as a huge asset and hence the reason we are so keen to invest in these relationships.
Madeline Arkins:
And, as I mentioned earlier at the opening, which is why we are so glad to have Sony as a partner in the upcoming UIIN Forum in London, and also to get that industry perspective because UIIN is, for the most part, I would say a network of universities and to really hear the other side of the tale from an industry perspective is always really valuable.
Going back to the Future Technology Group, I had the pleasure of also interviewing you two years back now, at our conference in Budapest, and you told me how the Future Technology Group alone operates across the UK, San Mateo, and Tokyo, which is such a diversity of places and individuals. How do you align and manage academic partnerships, globally in such a massive company as Sony, to ensure that they fit within Sony’s strategic goals?
Lucy Hattersley:
Obviously, those three territories are quite different, especially from an academic landscape, and it is just myself and two other colleagues that operate in those areas as well. That is purely because how things are administratively put together. Contracts work slightly different across those territories, so we find it better to have an expert on the ground, so to speak, in those territories.
But we do work very closely together, we have projects that scope across the three territories that work really well. Delivering things within project-based environments works well for us, so it doesn’t matter if you are not always online, work can be done remotely and then caught up, but there is always a synergy and a touch point.
We found that it is really important to make sure there is an anchor on the ground in whichever territory academic institutions are based, as well as having expertise across perhaps another couple of sites. Having that collaboration also brings us together as a team, as well as hopefully giving academia and universities a good experience of us that it doesn’t really matter where we are in the world, we will be working on one research theme.
Madeline Arkins:
I think that stands for so many people in a post-COVID world, that having people on the ground is important, but if there is synergy in the end goal, then you can really work anywhere.
On the topic of collaborations and successful ones, are there any examples that you could share of these innovative research, or projects that you do either within the Future Technologies Group or Sony more generally that have emerged from your collaborations with universities?
Lucy Hattersley:
We have a lot of engineers that join the family through this journey. I can think of a particular one, we had a fantastic opportunity with the University of York and a central doctoral training. We had Adrian who came through us through an audio project, because York is very strong in audio, and he completed his project with us for his PhD. During that placement, we obviously got a real nice feeling for each other in terms of what his capabilities were, what he could learn, what he brought to the table, and how we could look at applying it. And he fantastically finished his PhD, did really well, and then wanted to come back, so we found him a really cool audio role with the Future Technologies Group, so he is within our team.
What is really lovely is that we have still got a strong contact with University of York. He has connections to that central doctoral training and now he gets involved with projects and placements from students that are going through that journey.
It is a really nice continuity of what is happening, and Adrian has a real good strength in the audio areas, so we have watched him grow and become part of our team, which has been lovely.
Madeline Arkins:
Speaking about the challenges, because we always love to hear the nitty gritty of everything, and also having been on both sides of the arrangement in terms of your experience and now at Sony, what sort of challenges generally do you guys face when initiating partnerships from an industry perspective?
Lucy Hattersley:
From an industry perspective and from a university perspective, it is the same. I emphasise this at all the conferences when we mention it, but it is ultimately the structure of each university.
The main challenge for both universities and businesses when collaborating together is ultimately the structure of each university and trying to lift the hood to see who goes where and who sits with what.
Everyone has it in a different format. Some universities have a more central structural role, so you go to innovation offices or knowledge exchange offices, some are more foundational and it is led by the research groups themselves, but it is never easy to navigate.
I’m just one person trying to figure out who does what, having to go through that, then finding somebody someone that is interested and keeping that momentum. It can be quite hard work. And, from both sides, we are aware of it. Universities have a lot of departments and trying to navigate, for example, even just an NDA, can take a very long time. We are quite heavily formatted as well, we have certain levels and sometimes, when you find this perfect project and the unicorn sparkles happen and it is great, you can’t talk about it too much until this NDA’s gone and we have lost a month, two months, three months, people go on holiday, change under staffing, and that can be quite frustrating. The industry that Sony is in is moving quite quickly, so things change quickly. But I think everyone, industry and academia are very aware of it, and we are trying to work on it.
Madeline Arkins:
It is funny that you say that the challenges are the same on either side because sometimes we hear conversations akin to “Oh no, the two parties are so vastly different ergo they have vastly different problems in dealing with each other”. But the legal team certainly do get a lot of flack on both sides in terms of the bureaucracy and length of administration, so that’s certainly a shared challenge.
Lucy Hattersley:
It is also really important as well. I’m now joking about it, but it is very important to make sure, especially something like an NDA, it has to be foundational. And then I usually work on a mutual NDA’s. So then once they are done, we don’t have to worry about it again, but it is just taking that time to do it properly. It is really important.
Madeline Arkins:
This just came to mind now, at UIIN we are doing a lot of work on deep tech at the minute, and one problem that arises in deep tech is the technology is so quickly evolving that sometimes the actual advancements make you a little bit more disconnected from the original problem.
Once you are working out these technological solutions, how do you guys ensure that these academic collaborations remain relevant and aligned with the emerging trends, understanding that with things like NDAs and other administration procedures, it can take a little bit longer?
Lucy Hattersley:
It is a very good point and we do try and future-proof things, but obviously certain things are just accelerating at such a vast speed at the moment that no one really has a handle on it. We are trying to keep the focus on IP, who owns what, and that is quite future-proof in the fact that, whatever we work on, it will always be foundational to those developments.
I think that is pretty standard across any sector, to be honest. But I don’t know what the future holds, so we just hope that we have covered everything and in certain ways, we have to be reactive as things develop, but it is a good problem to have.
Madeline Arkins:
It is, and we didn’t invite you here for your prophecy abilities, though if you did have that power, Lucy, that would be very impressive.
The focus of the upcoming forum is all about partnerships and evaluating impact, which is something that oftentimes is deemed very elusive difficult to measure and track over time.
What metrics or indicators do you use or would you advocate for in order to assess the success or impact of academic partnerships? This is both in terms of innovation or indeed broader contributions.
Lucy Hattersley:
It is a big thing for us because we do have a metrics in-house at the moment that we are looking at, and we have developed them more to also keep track on other things because, as you just mentioned previously, as things move, things might need to pivot. So we are looking at what we are getting from our collaboration on both sides, and we will obviously listen to the academic side as well as our side.
We are also looking at those deliverables. For example, one may be if we have done a conference paper. I think we set a standard for every 12 weeks and we review to make sure we are on track and we are fully aware that not every 12 weeks we are going to have a conference paper, but one over X amount of years would be fantastic. At least there is a sort of gauge in there, but it is something that we are looking at.
For example, we have to go to a finance team, as well as a research board for the finance team, and they are literally looking at what you have spent your money on and what have you delivered. It is hard to look at that, whereas I know that we might have done 10 projects with students, we have accelerated some other things, we have sent some people off to do talks. These are all impactful things, but not necessarily what a finance board are looking at.
So, looking at that gauge to see, are we looking at the right thing? Is that fair? From my university background, I’m aware of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) in the UK. I know the REF can be deemed very difficult if you are not research-focused, and the KEF can be difficult because it is so many things all at once. So, it is just trying to see where we are really looking to see what other people are doing, what the thought patterns are, and assessing, selfishly, are we doing the right thing? And is there something that have we missed? And it is more of a discussion point.
I’m excited to see what the forum can bring out and what the workshops might help investigate, just to see what the senses are of how do others measure research and what is the ROI on it? I think it is really interesting.
Madeline Arkins:
What you mentioned, I was caught by “is it fair”, because it is just an entirely different perspective of what a finance team necessarily wants to read in order to capture what you are doing and what another team on the ground want to hear or want to see the results from.
And that is not to say that either are incorrect, but getting some sort of holistic view on partnerships is certainly something that everyone is seeking. I think these peer, knowledge-exchange moments like the forum are really key a place where people can tell what they are doing and also understand “maybe, I should not be doing this”.
Lucy Hattersley:
Yes, and I’m really interested to see what other people are doing and share what we are doing. Like you say, it could be really helpful and exciting to understand.
Madeline Arkins:
One thing I wanted to touch on, was the topic of talent acquisition. Obviously, talent shortage in a number of sectors is a big topic of conversation at the minute.
In Sony’s perspective, how do these academic partnerships play a role in maybe identifying or further developing talent for Sony? And what’s your approach to that?
Lucy Hattersley:
I can only talk from a business-unit level and, for example, PlayStation has a fantastic internship program in the US. It is very robust, it has been in existence for a long time and we don’t have that in a UK and Europe, but it is something that I’m part of a working group on and it is something that we are interested in looking at.
There are a few sort of things to consider there, like with remote working for example, and how that would impact on having an internship and whether you would have that day-to-day contact in the office. It is these sort of things that we are discussing at the moment, but from our Future Technologies Group impact, we definitely do placements.
We have spaces for some ad-hoc internships, but they are built on each project and whether there is an anchor team to support that. But we have always had a really good experience with those. I mentioned Adrian, who is part of our team now, but we also have a few people that have come to us through internship programs that have then joined the team.
How we scale it up or create an actual process for it is something that we are working on, but it was really interesting to hear about how other companies are doing it and how it is important for that talent pipeline from the last UIIN Business Group meeting that we had. In the Future Technologies Group there isn’t a process officially yet, but we are definitely aware of the importance of it. Yeah
Madeline Arkins:
From that last UIIN Business Group roundtable we had, that was also a very interesting point to see the different processes that each industry use and maybe why one is more suitable for one sector and then totally unsuitable for another in terms of the kind of effort that is needed to nurture talent from, and sometimes pre college, sometimes in late high school years, and whether it is suitable for the cadence of that sector.
One question, and you brought this up earlier in one of your earlier answers, was the concept of something being mutually beneficial. How do you ensure that partnerships can be mutually beneficial for the academics and institutions involved, particularly when we think about balancing corporate goals with academic freedom, or indeed institutions goals, and the kind of freedom that sometimes is more available in the corporate world?
Lucy Hattersley:
It is a really good question, and I think whenever you foundationaly set anything up, myself or my colleagues, we always make sure we have the right team to do that. That will take usually quite a long time to set up with lots of calls or meetings between research groups, academics, and our teams to make sure that we are talking the same language in research world.
We are involved in the process through the whole collaboration, so we make sure that we have got check-ins and things are going well. It is not “Oh, we have signed this. You guys got to go off and deliver it”. It is always making sure it is relevant, whether we go into talk in universities about it or whether we have academics come to us and talk about it internally and just share our developments and our successes.
And it is just making sure everyone keeps that energy and that passion going. It is putting your basic effort from both sides and make sure that you have the right people to do the right thing.
Madeline Arkins:
Having the same language is such a foundational element, but one that I think is often overlooked because it can become such an echo chamber of using your own jargon that one person’s interpretation of one word can differ vastly from the other partners.
Lucy Hattersley:
I think that is one of the hardest things that we experience as well. I will take engineers to meet really fantastic researchers and sometimes we are just not talking the right language. Everyone’s very clever and the researchers are telling us all the amazing things they have done and we are saying, “Oh, these are all the amazing things”, but we don’t get the answers. We are probably not answering the right questions. So everyone is there, the recipe is there, but nothing goes, so it takes a while for that to come through. It is a part of my job that I actually really like, and it is also the most challenging.
Madeline Arkins:
Leading people along the journey. Maybe one of our last questions, just being mindful of your time, Lucy. You mentioned advising engineers on how to speak the same language, maybe on the flip side of that coin, based on your experience, what advice would you give to academics who are looking to engage with industry partners like Sony? Particularly something a little bit more long-term, a more strategic partnership?
Lucy Hattersley:
Being as succinct as possible. For example, if you have a technology that you have been using for something else and you have an idea that you think might work for PlayStation, pitch it in that sense so we can then see where you think that this might be applied.
Answering “how would this technology work as part of our kit?”, or “what would that look like for you?” is really hard, so it is helpful to have, not even a solution, but a starting point of an application.
Madeline Arkins:
I like that, not a solution but a starting point, wise words. Maybe also on that, as we are preparing for the upcoming forum, are there any hopes you have in terms of what attendees will gain, especially in optimising the success of the partnerships?
Lucy Hattersley:
I’m a big fan of the power of the network, so I know that when we get UIIN members together, it is very powerful and it is always put together in a way that we can think about things in a different way and challenge ourselves. I’m hoping that we can all come with something in mind, be challenged and we can have a really good debate and discussions about the best way to move forward with this.
And we are using it as like a learning curve because we are quite new to this and whether we are doing a metrics thing or whether we need to think about something else would be really interesting, but to have that experience and ideas in a room is always the best way to look at it.
Madeline Arkins:
Absolutely. I am sure very fruitful discussions will come from it. And I hope we get to see some of the audience there. Lucy, I feel like that’s all that we have time for today, but thank you so much. There is obviously much more to say on such an intricate topic that is partnerships, but I think we have an overview of what Sony does and hopefully those who are interested in learning more will come to the UIIN Forum on November 7th.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us at office@uiin.org. That’s all from me, thank you so much for joining.
Lucy Hattersley:
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me and thanks everyone for listening. Hopefully we will see you at the forum.
Madeline Arkins:
Enjoy the rest of your day, everyone! Thank you.
Lucy Hattersley:
Ready for more?
Join us for the UIIN Forum: Evaluating Partnership Impact, hosted in collaboration with Sony Interactive Entertainment on 7 November 2024 in London.
This forum is an exclusive invitation for professionals from both industry and university to dive deep into the methodologies for capturing and measuring the results and impact of partnerships.
Explore clear metrics and indicators to assess the return on investment of university-industry engagement activities. Discover how businesses can quantify and maximise tangible and intangible returns, including innovation, talent acquisition, and brand positioning. For universities, learn to measure broader returns such as societal impact, advancements in research, and community contributions.
Stay tuned for the next episode on this series and don’t forget to follow us on your preferred podcast platform!
