Research and Innovation Staff Exchange as a Frame for Collaboration of Higher Education with Industry: Lessons Learned from WrightBroS Horizon 2020 EU Project

Abstract

The paper focusses on a collaboration between academia and industry. As an introduction, we present typical behavior of university researchers, who often define the area of application without consulting it with industrial partners, and we propose different approach which led to the definition of the scope of the WrightBroS project. The project, entitled “Collaborative Factory of the Flight Simulators Branch of RISE” is financed by the European Union in the frame of Horizon 2020 MSCA Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) programme. The international Consortium composed of Higher education (Silesian University of Technology from Poland) and industrial (LG Nexera from Austria and Virtual Reality Media from Slovakia) sectors, has designed a project as a collaborative platform whose know-how results from knowledge sharing among partners. Then, from the experience gained in the implementation of the WrightBroS and other similar projects, by using case-study methodology we demonstrate how representatives of education and industry in the new joint environment supplement each other in common research efforts. We also present methods for knowledge sharing, in particular achieved by intersectoral staff exchanging. Then we present the results achieved by collaboration of Higher Education with Industry in the WrightBroS project. Finally, the discussion in the context of tackling broader challenges of intersectoral collaboration leads to the conclusions that this kind of environment is very efficient way to overcome typical difficulties in academia and industry dialog, which is so common in the global world. Keywords: academia and industry collaboration, Horizon 2020 MSCA, research and innovation staff exchange, Horizon Europe MSCA, Augmented Reality (AR), flight simulators