Abstract:

In a fast changing global market, both higher education institutions and industry are being pressured to stay competitive and to foster innovation and technology change to contribute to regional development. In this scenario, industry and businesses are forced to look out for sources of innovation and knowledge and higher education institutions have the potential to create value for those organisations. On the other hand, higher education institutions also face globalisation and increasingly competitive environments and are forced to look for new sources of funding, acting in a real competitive market.

University-industry collaborations can therefore contribute to improve businesses' competitiveness, innovation and sustainability, which has been leading to a increasingly number of partnerships and collaborations between higher education institutions and business/industry organisations.

This implies that in most higher education institutions the core macro processes include partnerships and collaborative R&D projects and activities and consequently internal quality assurance systems in higher education institutions is no longer restricted to learning-teaching activities and support processes, but also have to consider these specific university-industry collaborations. Existing quality assurance systems need to be able to contribute to improve institutional collaboration networks without loosing their accountability, much need in the higher education accreditation processes.

This paper presents the characterisation of the university-industry collaborations and the challenges from the quality assurance point of view, considering that university-industry collaborations can take place in many forms, requiring different levels of formalisation and organisation.

Success factors of university-industry collaborations are derived from the literature and then compared against the ESG_2015 - Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in te European Higher Education Area and the portuguese agency (A3ES - Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Agency) Framework Reference for Internal Quality Assurance Systems.

From this comparison, tailored indicators to assess university-industry collaborations quality and performance are proposed, based on the example of ISEC Lisboa, a private higher education institution in Lisbon, Portugal.

Keywords:

University-Industry Collaborations, Quality Assurance, Total Quality Management, Quality and performance indicators, Higher education institutions.