Industry and Higher Education

In this viewpoint article, Professor John Kelly looks at causes and symptoms of the ever-growing emphasis on vocational education in university curricula. Are traditional notions of academe disappearing for ever? Or should universities take care to retain a critical distance from market-oriented curricula?

This issue of Industry and Higher Education includes a selection of papers based on presentations given at the Fourth SMESME International Conference held in Aalborg, Denmark, on 14–16 May 2001. SMESME stands for ‘Stimulating Manufacturing Excellence in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises’.

This paper considers what a university engineering school can do to stimulate manufacturing excellence in industry. Aalborg University with its unique use of problem-based learning methods, is used as a case example. This approach is also embedded in a new research initiative, the Centre for Industrial Production. Examples of industry involvement in research and development projects are given. Such university-industry collaboration will not only benefit the development of competencies in large and small industrial enterprises, but will also provide a laboratory setting for the study of integration and implementation. The engineering problem-solving approach helps to identify university core competencies and suggests a new research agenda.

This paper demonstrates that, despite the considerable challenges in transferring research knowledge, particularly to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), there are innovative methods of technology transfer that can be highly effective in both large companies and the SME context. It is argued that organizations must continually innovate products and processes, and constantly develop their knowledge base, in response to contemporary technological and social change. Innovation through the TCS model of technology transfer is examined, drawing on case studies that describe outcomes from the government-sponsored scheme, and a technology transfer method based on TCS. This leads to an analysis of why the TCS model is an effective method of technology transfer.

Norway's Rogaland Kurs og Kompetansesenter (Rogaland Training and Education Centre), serving the whole of the Rogaland County region, has developed an innovative method of providing vocational training to local industry through the formal education system. The courses offered range from secondary school to postgraduate level. Provision has been enhanced through e-learning based on experiences with the Internet gathered in research projects involving schools, higher education and industry – these projects are described in the paper. The author sees great potential in the model that has been developed for providing vocational training to industry in the region. The main challenges for the future are to make this a generally applicable model, so that it can be used in other regions of Norway, and to encourage cooperation among regions in course delivery.

This paper describes the first Business-to-Business mentoring programme, which was conducted in the North East region of England during 2000. This was a pilot for a scheme that is part of the region's overall effort to help small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) improve manufacturing praxis. A large host company mentored nine SMEs in the use of performance measurement with the help of a university-based expert facilitator. The programme lasted eight months, with support provided from the European Regional Development Fund. It was managed by the Regional Technology Centre in Sunderland. The authors show how the programme was initiated, how companies were recruited and how individual projects were selected. They go on to discuss how projects were tackled, how these related to objectives within partner companies and how successful mentoring was achieved. People-related issues, and teamworking, as always, present both a major challenge and an opportunity in schemes like this. Besides solving technical problems within the companies, the programme helped to engage existing staff skills in arriving at the various solutions, often to the surprise of company managers. It is suggested that, in addition to the many practical improvements that can be achieved, the well-known problem of changing patterns of control during small company growth can be facilitated by such schemes. The reasons why some companies benefited substantially and others failed to engage completely in the programme are also discussed.

This paper examines academic spin-off activity in universities and the development of different policies for academic entrepreneurship applicable to Wales. Detailed information on various aspects of spin-off development in Industrial South Wales (ISW) has been obtained through interviews with industrial liaison officers (ILOs) or their equivalents in all higher education institutions (HEIs) in ISW. The data gathered include quantitative information on developments over the last decade and qualitative information on university initiatives to help start-up businesses. The authors use this quantitative and qualitative information to address the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats relating to the development of academic spin-offs in ISW. The conclusions also draw on other initiatives in Europe and compare the results gathered with those of best practice elsewhere.

There has been increasing pressure on the providers of higher education to align courses with the needs of employers. Surveys have documented the importance of developing a broad range of vocational skills. However, priorities must be established, based on the demands of the workplace, within this identified skills gap. The first section of this paper identifies the need for the development of vocational skills in general, and then specifically in the area of management accounting. The second section presents the views of employers of management accountants on the relative importance of a specified set of vocational skills, and the level of these skills exhibited by graduates and recently qualified management accountants. These measures are then combined in a ‘weighted importance indicator’ to indicate the skills that are most in need of development.

The concepts of a learning cycle and a model teaching strategy described in a previous paper are connected here with problem solving and learning contexts. Then they are applied to the analysis of an introductory course in physics for engineering and basic science students. Finally, ‘creativity’ is considered as a learning methodology implying that students work as coauthors in the development of learning contexts and in the design and solution of problems.