Driving a Sustainable University-Industry Partnership

Abstract

There has been a lot of emphasis on the need for academia-industry collaboration. A successful and sustainable academia-industry partnership can result from a university’s efforts in driving values in its collaboration with industry. This chapter describes a model for mainstreaming a sustainable university partnership with industry through the university’s academic curriculum. The University-Industry Innovation eXchange (UNIX) internship program is a project-based industrial training scheme that is integrated with research projects to provide students with an engaging experience of working with industry for up to one year to solve practical industrial problems. Successful implementation of UNIX projects within the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia’s (UTM) work-based curriculum contributes toward nurturing life-ready and job-ready graduates, development of resilient and sustainable organisation through improved operations, and enhanced university-industry partnership.