Over the last few years, national and international conferences such as ESCAPE, PSE, AIChE/CAST meetings, FOCAPO/D, etc, have become progressively more dominated by academia. This is true of participation (where industry typically represents less than 20% of the audience) and especially of the papers presented (meaningful industrial papers are now an extreme rarity). The potential consequences of this separation of the technology providers and its end-users are serious. An implementatian gap is opening up : the tools used to address even today’s problems have not been updated to reflect research results and tomorrow’s problems are being largely ignored. This paper will reflect on how this situation has arisen and is becoming worse and will put forward suggestions to begin the debate : "how can the earlier partner ship (which lead to significant progress in the 70s and 80s) be re-established and the developing lose/lose problem be transformed into a potential win/win opportunity?"