What Makes a Flow Interesting to Industrial and Academic Researchers?

A variety of motivations drive research in academia and industry, but it's safe to say that activity often occurs in areas that are either funded, interesting, or novel.  While it's usually clear when work is funded, interest and novelty in a given area is often a matter of perspective that can vary significantly from industry to academia.  Research topics with enormous economic impact in industry can sometimes be ignored by academics because the topics seem trivial or the impact of the work is not obvious. Industry often does a poor job communicating its needs because of its short-term focus, its broad interests, and a lack of experience working with academics.  In this talk I will draw on examples of novel flows and industrial unanswered questions in the area of complex fluid flows and contrast them with my perception of the current trends in the same field for academia.  The intent is to communicate needs for the field that may be unknown outside of industry, but also to suggest ways of better communicating research motivations in both directions.