I like to teach and research by working alongside industry. Lets face it, there are things industry are very good at, the same goes for universities. In particular both parties have a few responsibilities:

For teaching

• Universities need to recognise that they are supposed to train people for the real world (and many do by the way)
  
• Industry needs to take an active role in making sure teaching is realistic. Whether that means giving guest lectures, putting up prizes, helping to set realistic coursework, the possibilities are endless.

For research

• Universities need to be willing to research things that are of active interest to industry. I like blue sky research, blue sky is good; the occasional piece of research we can patent and sell wouldn't kill us though.
• Industry needs to be willing to trust us to do it. We recognise industrial research may require NDAs etc, academics are a responsible bunch on the whole. A lot of the time we cannot get our foot in the door though....
  

If we all work together everything could be copacetic. I've done some pretty exciting stuff over the past 5 years on both the research and teaching front, come on industry, what do you want to do next?