Given the escalating demands of our information age and the pervasiveness and multiplicity of new technologies it is no wonder that business and industry, and the USA's National Academy of Engineering, feels the need for appropriate education beyond the master's degree level. Furthermore, there seems to be significant call for more than the ubiquitous corporate professional development opportunities that address specific needed topics but in a rather non-systematic programmatic manner. The authors view the forces leading to the need for a professional doctorate as depicted in the following illustration's converging arrows. The arrows in Figure 1 represent these forces converging on universities and on business and industry. The core of the figure depicts four primary aspects of advanced post-graduate (doctoral in this case) education that need to be tailored to create a professional doctorate program responsive to the situation faced by contemporary business and industry.
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