I'd also like to emphasize that in industry projects there is a more varied workforce which helps speed things along. For my senior year of undergrad, our senior project involved working with a company and that was one of the main things I noticed. In academia, not only are resources limited, but most people (if not all) working in a project are professors and undergraduate/graduate students in the same field. In the industry, not only do you have engineers in a project, but also clinical advisers, manufacturing workers, marketing people, maybe technicians and IT, etc. This helps projects be completed more quickly and wholly as it adds different perspectives and insights necessary to make it successful. At the beginning of my senior project (when only the engineers were involved), we decided on one prototype. After meeting with clinical advisers and the manufacturing and marketing team of the company, we had to completely scrap that idea and come up with something else. We ended up taking longer to get to the testing phase because of this, but it was a great learning experience. In the industry, we would have had meetings with these different departments in the planning, and could have avoided wasting time in a design that would eventually become useless, even though it was good in the engineering sense.

Academic research is more flexible in terms of how the procedure is to be followed since there are no such deadlines and the researcher has more control over the time. In academic the funding is public which makes it limited whereas in industry research the funding in private which make it more flexible. In industry research you work with other employees who have accomplishment of sharing the same goal their lot of guidance from seniors for the research but in academia research there is less opportunity to work with a team since the research must be done alone. In academia there is no advancement in the career whereas in industry there in advancement in the career. There is more recognition of the performance in the industry as compared to the academia research. In industry the research is short and have more pressure but in academia research the research is for a long time.

That is very interesting but what does happen if that proper structure does not work or is interrupted? Would the project not be successful? The flow in the industry can be interrupted if lets say someone does not finish their part on time or has a problem with their side of the project? I feel like there are still flaws even with the proper structure in industry.

I have a bit of R&D experiences in industry, but it is not inside the lab. I do work closely with those in the lab itself, so I will talk a bit about that. The time given is a great deal less than in academia, but the access to varied resources is much greater. I work for J&J Consumer. I have spent a great deal of time talking to someone creating a novel form of soap. The biggest difference is definitely the varied knowledge bases in the company. In a lab the majority of the people working in that lab will be focused on the same thing. The lab that I worked in at school was focused on traumatic brain injury so they had many experts in the field but not in others. In industry the people who work there all have highly varied experience. So when my friend got stuck trying to balance parts of his formula, he asked around and found someone who is an expert in the problem he was having. That meant that in less than one full work day he was in contact with a person who could help him solve his problem. One big difference at least in my experience is that because I work for a large company I have to deal with the bureaucracy that comes with it. I didn't have to deal with this in the lab. If I needed anything I just went and got it. I didn't need approval or support, I could just execute.

To those of you who have experience with both, what do you think the major differences are with regards to time?

While I have not had any experience yet conducting research in the industry, I have had the opportunity to perform academic research. Like the previous commenter before me, I have also studied traumatic brain injury at NJIT. A comment that a grad student had said to me was "We are not even touching the corner of concussion research". I feel that most academic research does not have large breakthroughs, instead, they slowly build up the pieces to a much larger and complicated puzzle. I feel that my experience in academia has convinced me that industry research is a more exciting career path for me. There is more of an "instant" gratification feel in the industry than in academia. The industry also provides the money for the research, whereas in academia, you need to seek out the money for research from grants and contract work. Overall, I feel that the industry gives a more comfortable lifestyle that I am looking to live.

I agree with the above replies, as research in academia is more likely open-ended in a way or another, managed by a Professor. While in Industry research takes a slightly different path in which the research goal is set clearly, with a well-designed and studied timeline, and with a most likely expected outcome. The fund in both depends on the lab/research and on the institute/company. Team members are different also, in academia it is a grad student who is in the same level and learning things as they work in the lab, getting some instructions or advice from their professor which might be frustrating sometimes for the grad student. Results may not be satisfactory enough for the professor in the end, and they may need to review and repeat many steps until some better results are reached. While in industry, although a researcher may need to work harder to meet managers deadline, still researchers in academia usually have harsher deadlines such as conference submitting and grants.

For me, I would say that so far, this course convinced me more to try my best to work as a research scientist in the industry as I will have more opportunities to contribute in many different projects in a shorter period. It also depends in the end on the researcher personality and available chances.

From my experience in big industry, upper management decide what project to take up. These projects could be new products, line extensions, improvement to old products, etc. They determine which would have the best business case, which could be based on profit, or entering an untapped market, or fixing problems that could potentially cause a recall. From my experience, the researcher/engineer will be given a hard cap to when the project needs to be completed. Usually it's enough but for business critical projects, the deadlines are much shorter and tighter. This could be due to a potential loss of product on the market by missing submission deadlines or like I previously mentioned, due to a recall. Either way, this is when things need to get duct taped and superglued to be fixed. The project is successful in the sense that it saved the business but it may not be the best product that it could be. Another project would be created to upgrade this and it becomes a cycle. So industry projects may be quicker and technically successful but with more time a better end product could have been created.

The key difference lies in the purpose of conducting research. In academia researchers start with a question and try to answer it. Even if they can't answer their original question, meaningful and repeatable data make the research valuable. Whereas in industry the scientists are take to come up with solutions or innovative alternatives that address a market gap.
For that reason research in industry is what allows many products to reach the market relatively quickly. In contrast, it may take many years, decades even, before research conducted in academia to reach fruition.
I would rather conduct research in industry because I am very goal oriented. I would feel more content being able put products on the market (see it come to life).

Before considering if Industry research is " successful" , we need to define what " success" actually is. What parameters are we using to measure success? is it in term of achieving an end result within the expected timeframe, or within the expected budget? Is the product effective to perform its expected function delineated in the design? Is the client satisfied with the product? If the end products happen to satisfy all these parameters, perhaps the project should be considered ''successful''. However, judging the end results of those same projects, by Academia standard, the projects might not be viewed as successful. It good example might what Dr. Simon mentioned in his lecture about omitting to include controls some in Industry research for the timeline or costs-driven reasons. A researcher in Academia might not regard a laboratory investigation conducted without a control set to be successful even though by Industry standard, the project was considered "successful". Therefore, I think success is an ambiguous term when comparing efficacy in Industry and Academia research.

From my experience I feel working in a company is tougher as you have a comparatively less time to complete a project. A constant monitor must be done by the project manager to see whether everyone is working efficiently in order to finish the project. A proper approach must be taken before starting off. A company may be successful and sometimes not but to become a successful company one must learn from their failures. Working in the real world depends on several factors like the business model, deadlines and client needs and fulfilling all of them results in success.

In academia the research is done based on your interest or curiosity. It may be done taking time based on achieving satisfactory results. Most importantly there would be no higher officials pressurizing the researcher to complete the project. But in the industry, there is bounded timeframe and the requirements that are set by the management, should be achievable. If not the project becomes a failure. But the scope of experienced researchers would be there to solve the unsolved solutions in lesser span of time which would be an added advantage.

Let's start off with industry first. 

I have done some research in Industry and what I can say is the projects in the  industry do get finished on time and they are successful as well that is because they know what they want from the end product and there is usually only little improvement over the product already in the market also, there is manpower, as well as a dedicated time,  is given every day for the project to be finished on time,there is a set plan as to how the research is to be done.

In academia:
In academia, there is usually a single person or a team of two performing a project and there is a lot of trial and error involved while performing the experiments so a lot of time needed. The people working in the team are usually working on other projects so the time is divided.
If there are no results from the project, the project is shelved and other projects are taken into consideration.

I believe that projects in the industry are more successful because we have more resources when compared to academia. An industry also has a hierarchical stature of employees which makes it more organized than a team of graduate students and a professor. I believe that projects done in industry are completed faster because of management; if the project is running a bit slow then management will either tell the team to work harder or will pull in more resources, thus increasing the chances of the project to be successful and to meet its deadline. When I was working on a project which involved testing and eventually replacing a component of a medical device, we had already passed the deadline and it seemed as if this project would extend even longer on the scale of months. Keeping good communication with the team, we had all decided that we were using too many resources for a project that had hit a dead end. So yes, there are instances where some projects are not as successful but I still believe that the industry has a higher success rate than academia. 

With several years of product development experience at a medical device company under my belt, I can say that one of the major factors in being able to complete projects is to be able to access more resources when they are necessary. I was once told by someone who worked a full career that, "No project was ever completed by saving money." However, spending money on more equipment or more employees needs to be justifiable in every case. Similarly, there are several design review meetings between each phase of a product development project. In these design reviews, the deliverables from that phase are reviewed and the project is either approved by the board to proceed or not to proceed. Reasons for a project not to proceed would be if there are major delays or the project is getting too expensive. The sooner it is determined that a project will be cancelled, the less money the company will waste on it. Therefore, projects that are able to be completed have high confidence from the start and generally only have minor delays, if any.

In research lab in academia, we perform animal testing till we are satisfied with the result. This costs time and money. As this is solely for research purpose, the constraints are less strict than industry. In industry it is fast paced environment, time and money are the most strict constraints. The company allow a certain amount of money from their budget for research purpose. There is also a very strict deadline for the project submission. Extending both of these are hard.