Businesses worldwide are working to outperform their competition by putting technology innovation at the forefront of their everyday business practices. It’s a never-ending quest to get ahead, not to mention staying ahead, and this requires constant vigilance and ever-evolving strategic vision.

In Europe, for the past couple of years, a growing number of Microsoft^® customers and partners have benefited from the Research Partnership Programme (RPP), spearheaded by Natasa Milic-Frayling, senior researcher in the Integrated Systems group within Microsoft Research Cambridge.

RPP works closely with Microsoft account managers and consulting teams in Europe to learn about technology and research goals of partners and clients. It engages in dialogue with industry-leading customers about strategy and opportunities to maintain a competitive edge by capitalizing on state-of-the-art research.

“Normally, innovation reaches our customers through Microsoft products and services,” Milic-Frayling says. “Our partners realize value from our platform while building custom solutions to meet the requirements and to satisfy the needs of customers.”

Natasa Milic-Frayling discusses Microsoft Research Cambridge's Research Partnership Programme during the Microsoft Research Innovation Day, Nov. 9 in Brussels, Belgium.

“Microsoft Research is focused on innovation, and through both the talent of our researchers and our links with leading academic institutions, governments, and industry partners, we are turning ideas into reality. Sharing them with our key industry clients ensures an immediate positive impact from our knowledge and demonstrates how we are helping customers realize their potential.”

RPP has embarked on some ambitious endeavors in its two-year existence. One, involving close contact with the Microsoft team working with the British Broadcasting Corporation to deliver BBC jam, is designed to stimulate online learning for United Kingdom youths aged 5-16. Another is an ongoing collaboration with the Microsoft team working with the British Library on a platform for digitizing and storing its vast holdings and providing access to its U.K. Web archive. Other European efforts are under way, with organizations ranging from manufacturing to finance to government.

“In a highly competitive and challenging marketplace,” Milic-Frayling says, “industry leaders are seeking ways to secure their long-term competitiveness. They look to Microsoft for guidance in addressing technology challenges they are facing. This creates an interesting opportunity for researchers to provide value through exchange of knowledge and experience.

“Realizing that our research team, Integrated Systems, has been working in areas relevant to the BBC and the British Library, the respective account liaisons requested our help. The word about helpful Microsoft Research input spread, and soon we had requests for engagement from several other accounts and global Microsoft organizations, such as Enterprise Strategy Consultants. It was clear that the interface between Microsoft Research and the subsidiaries needed to be more formalized.”

Milic-Frayling’s proposal to establish RPP was well received by Andrew Herbert, managing director of the Cambridge lab, and supported by Ken Wood, assistant lab director and head of the Computer-Mediated Living group, which includes the Integrated Systems team. Success followed promptly.

The RPP mission includes strengthening customer relationships and shaping product-group strategy with regard to specific industries and business segments. Researchers join forces with other Microsoft teams, with Milic-Frayling serving as liaison and facilitator, to catalyze solution strategies across the company.

RPP mobilizes groups across Microsoft organizations. It connects with the Industry Strategy Group in Redmond, led by Ian Sands, and consults with the Greenhouse Incubation team led by Bobby Kishore. It works closely with Behrooz Chitsaz, director of licensing at Microsoft Research, to learn about opportunities for bringing relevant research technologies to customers.

It’s all about sharing information and insights.

“The powerful concept behind RPP,” Milic-Frayling says, “is the exchange of knowledge between researchers and customers who use Microsoft technologies but want or need to reach beyond what is currently available. This happens in the form of technical briefings and demonstrations of research prototypes. We learn about customer needs, visions, and aspirations, and how they wish to achieve them. In return, we share our knowledge about the state of the art in relevant areas and think of ways to approach specified challenges.”

The engagement typically involves four distinct stages:

• Providing information on the state of the art in various disciplines.

• Learning about the needs and opportunities for innovation.

• Assisting communication between product teams and Microsoft teams working with the client.

• Advising on the global Microsoft strategy for addressing specific customer needs from a technological perspective.

“Although, on the surface, our engagement may resemble standard consulting services,” Milic-Frayling notes, “in fact, it differs very significantly in various aspects. We are sharing our knowledge and experience with both our teams and our customers in an impartial way. We bring in insights from research that are relevant to the problems. We do not provide paid services or deliver products or prototypes. If there is interest in any of the existing research technologies, we refer the customer to the Microsoft Research Licensing team.”

For customers, the stakes are high. For example, the British Library project has lofty goals—an unprecedented effort to preserve content through digitization and to provide archival access via pioneering search technologies and information-management systems. The British Library boasts the world’s largest, most comprehensive research collection, including more than 13 million books, 7 million manuscripts, 4.5 million maps, 56 million patents, 3.5 million sound recordings, 8 million stamps, and 58 million newspapers in various formats.

In close partnership with Microsoft, the British Library’s effort is intended to break new ground in information management and search. Led by Geoff Hughes, Microsoft U.K. platform strategy advisor for Developer and Platform Evangelism, the relationship has prompted discussions within the company about search strategy, involving researchers, product groups, and Microsoft executives at all levels. MSN^® has contributed $2.5 million toward the digitization of 100,000 books from the library. Through RPP, researchers in information retrieval, machine learning, image processing, and networks and architectures are helping determine the requirements to support indexing, searching, and browsing of information on a terabyte scale and rich user experience in desktop and mobile access to dynamic content and multimedia documents.

Through RPP, Microsoft Research joined the British Library-led consortium of 16 organizations working on the PLANETS project, sponsored by the European Union to address the critical issues of long-term preservation of digital objects. Microsoft Research Cambridge is contributing the expertise and the technology for preserving Office documents through conversion into Microsoft Office Open XML formats.

Other work is occurring with partners elsewhere in Europe. Microsoft Research Cambridge expertise in security, distributed networks, and optimization techniques is shared with clients with international presence. A recent meeting with 17 executives from a major financial-services account covered a variety of technology areas that portray the far-reaching scope of Microsoft Research. It involved researchers from the Security, Distributed Systems, and Constraint Reasoning groups at Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft Research Redmond technologies for multi-screen display from the VIBE group, led by Mary Czerwinski, and data-visualization techniques from the Community Technologies group, led by Marc Smith.

In collaboration with Walter Stiers, a technology evangelist for academic programs at Microsoft Belgium and Luxembourg, RPP recently engaged with the ROMAS project, a research consortium of several Belgian partners from academia and industry working on mobile applications and services. The project is co-funded by a Flemish research institute, the Interdisciplinary Institute for BroadBand Technology. Microsoft Belgium and Luxembourg is one of the founding members of the consortium and has provided support for evaluating several mobile prototypes from Microsoft Research Cambridge. These will be deployed in i-City, a locality blanketed by wireless networks in which 4,000 volunteers will participate in user studies. Microsoft Research Cambridge is contributing the technology and user-research expertise and, together with ROMAS and i-City researchers, will conduct interdisciplinary user evaluation of technologies and designs.

“We expect to learn a great deal about the large-scale evaluation of mobile technologies in general,” Milic-Frayling says, “and the research prototypes in particular.”

The results of RPP engagements are delivering value, as evidenced in May, when the British Library project was presented with the U.K. OneEd Award, recognizing its achievement and cooperation from Microsoft, citing the efforts of Milic-Frayling, Hughes, and Kelvyn Hicks, schools business manager for the Education Solutions Group in the United Kingdom.

“This was a great recognition of the success of the RPP engagement,” says Milic-Frayling, noting that such results have not been uncommon in the initiative’s two years.

“Researchers’ engagements with our customers are very well received,” she confirms. “With our longer-term outlook, we are trusted for our product agnostic approach and genuine interest in resolving difficult technology and design problems.”

But customers are not the only ones reaping benefits from the Research Partnership Programme. Based on feedback from Microsoft offices around the world and from industry leaders, RPP is collaborating with Microsoft business-strategy teams in Europe to help define the company’s innovation strategy and develop Microsoft’s partner programme. Researchers participating in RPP are challenged by real-world industry problems that help Microsoft Research Cambridge stay relevant and well-informed, in addition to identifying potential new research areas to explore.

“RPP brings real-world problems closer to researchers,” Milic-Frayling concludes. “Talking to industry-leading customers with groundbreaking aspirations, we learn about the challenges they are facing. We uncover exciting opportunities to innovate and are inspired to include them in our research.”