International company-university cooperation

This report constituted the main deliverable arising from WP 2.2 of the TEMPUS Project. 

WP 2.2. central objective was to collect good practices aiming to develop innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship among Ukrainian universities, having in mind three main areas: Educational standards in the IT sector; Practices for supporting innovation; and the context for cooperation and interaction between companies and universities.

The “State of European University-Business Cooperation” Report (2011) (hereinafter “UBC Report”), sponsored by the European Commission (DG Education) and compiled by Munster University was adopted as a model for this report, especially for the integration of the good practices collected among the project partners.

The 20 practices collected were in a first moment divided into the “4-pillar” structure provided by the UBC Report: “Strategies”, “Structures and Approaches”, “Activities” and “Framework Conditions”.

In a second stage, the same practices were merged into 4 main axes, which represent four major areas of intervention regarding modern University-Business Collaborations, as appointed by the European Tempus Project Members: A1 - Bringing courses contents closer to company needs; A2 – Bridging students to companies; A3 – Innovation and ideas showcases: innovators meet investors and A4 – UBC networking and knowledge transfer internal organisation.

Therefore, from the original group of 20 practices collected, regardless of their systematization into the 4-pillar structure (above), it was possible to merge them into four main axes: A1 (8 practices), A2 (2 practices), A3 (4 practices) and A4 (6 practices) as examples of the respective trends.

The next stage of the report was a cross-linkage between both classifications, identifying synergies and proximities, as follows:

A1, A2 and A4 relate essentially to Strategies, Structures and Framework pillars because they:

• Offer examples of practices that combined shall be part of the University mission and vision, provided that they benefit from a strong support from top management;
• Bring together cases of policies, actions and internal structures that would help the development of more intense UBC;
• Would certainly benefit from a higher level of commitment, namely regulatory and legal that could extend to universities, at a national level, some of these practices as mandatory.

A3 is mainly linked with Strategies and Activities pillars due to the fact that:

• Is also a group of practices that benefit from the support of the top management and shall be included in the University mission and vision regarding UBC;
• Are concrete examples of activities to be developed, either internally by each University or under combined actions (multi-part events, for example).

The final part of the report was dedicated to an analysis of the questionnaire distributed among Tempus project partners. The goal was to understand the major differences between these activities among European and Ukrainian partners, in order to prepare the WP3 work, dedicated to the draft and recommendation of the practices that suit the best to Ukrainian reality, from those collected in this WP 2.2.

An Annex with the full and comprehensive list of the 20 good practices collected among the TEMPUS project partners was also included in this report.