This work with universities is central to IBM's Big Data strategy. As researchers use Watson for their projects, they're bound to develop applications for the system, broadening into medicine, finance, corporate governance, and scientific discovery. As they do this, the Watson technologies could evolve into a platform. It's by distributing the technology this way that IBM can hope to gain a lead over its most likely competitors in extracting learnings from Big Data. They would include Google and HP, among others.