Not to beat a dead horse, but we’ve been speaking the past few months about corporate mergers and the intersection between academia and industry, and while these are separate topics, to be sure, I am motivated to continue both conversations.

In the wake of Cadence’s acquisition of EMA Design Automation, I warned of the risks to EMA's customer-centric culture as it assimilates into its new parent. I also pointed out the possibility that the investment in EMA’s novel tools could wane: a $5 billion company might not see value in supporting products that, in their entirety, might be worth less than a single average-sized customer.

There’s a bigger issue, however. Every growth company has talent, and that talent sometimes gets lost in the mix of the larger entity.

To be sure, I’m not speaking directly to the Cadence-EMA integration. Rather, there is a long industry tradition of M&A in which the acquired company does not mesh with its new ownership. The reasons vary, of course: personality conflicts, lack of product synergy, territorial disputes, and so on. But the opportunity remains for all the creativity and talent of the smaller ones to disappear in short order.

Raise your hand if you remember some of the smaller companies that have been bought by larger ones in this space, only to be bought back by their founders for pennies on the dollar a few years later. And that goes not only for ECAD suppliers but also for fabricators and EMS companies as well.

If electric potential (V) can be defined as V = W/q, where W is the work done to move the charge (q), then perhaps the failure to achieve business potential could be V_f = W/I, where P_f is the failure to achieve potential, W is the work done divided by the initiative (I) to begin and complete that work. The lack of initiative dooms these deals. And that missing element is generally a management failure, whereby leadership ignores the very basic process of setting goals and establishing objectives that are aligned with those goals for both the incoming workers and their new colleagues.

We are in the midst of an exciting time for startups, mostly in the ECAD and OEM spaces. The rapid appearance of so many new and relatively well-funded companies is at once exciting and concerning, since we’ve seen this play before and know how it ends. Most of them won’t make it; they will fail because their business model is weak, their sales team is lacking, or their offering is undifferentiated versus the competition (or just plain doesn’t work). Some of the “lucky” ones will be bought, possibly on great terms for their founders and investors. And when that happens, a generation of entrepreneurship and new energy will disappear.

Let’s not let that happen again. We need these new bright minds and the teams they put together to stick around for a change. No one knows their business like a founder – and no one has their passion to make it a reality.

Some acquirers look at their new colleagues as barbarians at the gate to the castle. Management might want to look a little deeper: The worst case is to spend a lot of money on something and be left with nothing to show for it.

On the topic of having nothing to show for your investment, among the considerable masses we had the pleasure of meeting at PCB East this year (attendance grew 48% year-over-year) were a few college undergraduates.

And while last month I questioned an industry that on the one hand agonizes over the lack of interest from the younger generation while simultaneously giving the Heisman to the opportunity to actually, you know, show that generation what we do, it cuts both directions.

To wit: The schools that are compromising their students’ education by putting expediency above quality. We met at PCB East with some wonderful and creative students who are taking a class on PCB design administered through their college. And it was discouraging to hear how little interaction they are receiving from their instructor, and how limited their instruction has been. For instance, while they showed us a board they had developed, they were unfamiliar with basic elements such as fiducials and tooling holes, and made a fundamental routing mistake that any competent designer would have caught.

And therein lies the rub. Too often, programs are developed and pitched to an academic bureaucracy that simply does not have the background to assess good and bad. It’s the equivalent of sending your design to the board shop on the corner with a flashlight for imaging and an electric skillet for curing (IYKYK). Instructors with no experience in board design – or sometimes, in electronics – are asked to lead classes and are heading into the semester with literally no syllabus. The students don’t know the difference and ultimately are paying for an education no better than what they could have received from watching a few YouTube videos. It’s a mess.

It calls for more interaction between industry and academia to ensure the latter knows what it doesn’t know. Circuit theory is important, but it’s only part of the design-to-manufacture equation. Success knows no shortcuts. Designers and engineers need to know both, and the best way to learn it is from those of us who live it every day.

Mike Buetow is president of PCEA (pcea.net); mike@pcea.net.