Fostering university-industry collaborations through university teaching

Abstract

Unversity-industry links and their impact on innovation processes have been widely acknowledged. However, previous studies have mainly examined university-industry knowledge transfer activities from the perspective of the research and third stream missions. This paper goes a step further, analysing such processes from the perspective of the university’s teaching mission. More specifically, it explores how educational crowdsourcing platforms help bring universities and industry together to develop joint activities in undergraduate and graduate programmes. Nine platforms with different business models were examined. A qualitative exploratory approach was adopted to manually collect and analyse data from the platforms. This study identified three categories of educational crowdsourcing platforms based on their focus (education, crowdsourcing or networking). The analysis shows that, although these platforms have some shortcomings, they provide benefits to all stakeholders by facilitating experiential learning, promoting skills acquisition and encouraging the development of new ideas to meet industry needs.