A Concept of Academia-Industry Collaboration to Facilitate the Building of Technical and Professional Competencies in New Product Development

摘要

The development of innovative and competitive products is crucial for any company's long-term success in the global information society and the global market. Educational engineering programs should facilitate the building of both technical and professional engineering competences. Project based learning, teamwork and real-life product development in collaboration with industrial companies seem to be appropriate ingredients of such programs. A concept of academia-industry collaboration and its realisations were developed and applied by a strategic alliance of European universities. Initial results of the communication-trust building-creativity triad showed some properties of one of the applied concept realisations. Although the concept and its realisations were deemed successful, identified issues have to be addressed in the future.