Abstract:

In the age of globalization and knowledge based economy, manufacturing industry has to continuously improve their processes and develop their employees in order to remain their competitiveness in the market.

In this context, the collaboration between industry and universities becomes of vital importance. Universities and industry have traditionally maintained fairly informal or lose ways of cooperation when it comes to education. This article presents a novel and fruitful cooperation which has been established between the University of Skövde, the Industrial Development Center in the region, IDC West Sweden AB, and the manufacturing industry.

The paper describes the development, lessons learned so far and the outcome of more than 3 years’ experience of close collaboration between the different stakeholders. It presents a methodology, used by the consortium to help manufacturing industries to improve their competiveness using a three phase approach, namely: a company analysis, applied education and long-term coaching. A special focus is put on a long-term commitment by all partners. This alliance has helped training more than 2.500 professionals from 120 different companies over the past years in mainly lean manufacturing.

The established collaboration has been strengthened over this period of time by a number of shared research projects. One of these projects involves an evaluation of the impact that this presented consortium has had on the regions´ industry. Lean Learning Academies is another project that has been funded by the European Union within the Lifelong Learning Programme, with the aim of increase the competitiveness of European companies and enhance the employability of students.

Keywords:

University-industry collaboration, cooperation benefits, lifelong education, education in lean, Lean Learning Academy