Academia–business cooperation: A strategic plan for an innovative executive education program

Abstract

A major challenge facing institutions of higher learning is academia–business cooperation. To achieve it, some universities have introduced modest university–industry initiatives and executive education programs that in general have remained strategically inefficient. Meanwhile, in the last 20 years various researchers have called for the development of fully fledged entrepreneurial universities. However, according to many studies in the literature, the guidelines and standards that define these universities remain hard to adopt in conventional institutions as they reshape their whole mission and vision, organizational structure, leadership, culture, academic programs, type of research, incentives and rewards, and influence within the ecosystem. This paper argues that, given the inefficiencies in executive education programs and the difficulties and challenges in transforming conventional universities into entrepreneurial universities, a special efficient entity for executive education adopting an entrepreneurial approach should be developed in higher learning institutions to improve academia–business cooperation and to provide a potential pathway for a gradual transformation into an entrepreneurial university. Thus, the authors develop an innovative executive education strategic plan for universities to consider, coining the 10 Cs of the executive education alphabet—Commitment, Command, Collaboration, Capacity, Content, Cohesiveness, Competition, Cost, Cognizance and Communication—with the broad goal of building an efficient link between universities and the industrial and corporate sectors.