Strategic and Tactical Approaches on University - Industry Collaboration

This paper presents the strategic and tactical approaches on university and industry collaboration in contemporary commercial climate. Currently, the Malaysian government is transforming the nation into an international education hub & as a result, the public and private universities are constantly on the move to conduct collaboration with other universities, institutions, and the industries. In many cases, such collaborations were initiated, signed, and essentially expired without any activities involved. Thus, a successful collaboration needs to involve a dedicated project champion to manage the collaboration and to keep the relationship on-going at all times. The success factors will depend largely on the strategic and tactical approaches made by the university as one of the party or collaborators. This paper provides a commercial approach which may be adopted by the university in propagating the collaboration resulting in a win-win situation for both collaborators. First, the collaboration in a strategic sense between the university and the industry can be shaped in ways such as research, research consultancy, staff attachment, student internship, student placement, examination of student scholastic achievement, and etc. Thus, a holistic view must be made in the first instance to ensure that such components are well addressed. Then, the selective process will be used to narrow down the common strategic denominators between the industry and the university. The second stage is now known as tactical aspect of the collaboration. The tactical aspect must address at least 3 aspects; personnel, finance & facilities, and a thorough implementation plan for both parties. Milestones must be set to ensure that the support level is optimized so that the action plan and successes arising from the plan are constantly monitored and adjusted if necessary