“You can view this as a pure pipeline,” says Mr. Chien, himself a former professor.

Jean Stéphenne, president of the vaccine division of GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company, says university partnerships with corporations will grow “because technology is changing so rapidly.” Even if companies have the resources to finance their own research and identify the right academic problems to tackle, they usually don’t have the time to assemble a staff to pursue these problems. Without help from university professors, Mr. Stéphenne asks, “How can we cope?”

Some people doubt that formal partnerships between corporations and universities can deliver real benefits.

“Universities don’t innovate,” says Curtis R. Carlson, chief executive of SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, Calif., that bought what remained of RCA’s lab. “Innovation means you get it out so people can use it. The university is not going to take it to the world.”

But corporations hope that universities can help them take innovations to the world faster and more efficiently. Last month, BP pledged to spend $500 million over 10 years on alternative-energy research to be carried out by a new Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley, which will manage work done at a nearby Department of Energy lab and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“This is a new model we’re working through in real time,” says Robert J. Birgeneau, the chancellor of Berkeley.

CRITICS of corporate-university partnerships fear limits on academic freedom or, worse, that companies might censor results that go against their interests. The risk of such interference seems small, however. Despite the large amount being offered by BP, the money will be divided three ways; of Berkeley’s annual research budget of $500 million (nearly all from the federal government), BP will be contributing less than 3 percent.

Under the terms of the partnership, meanwhile, Berkeley professors are free to publish results of BP-funded research. The university also will own the rights to any resulting intellectual property. BP would even have to license that intellectual property, though payments are capped and the company would get the first look at promising results.