Abstract:

This paper deals with the motivation of students, scientific staff of universities and industrial partners to cooperate on joint projects. In this particular kind of collaboration it is essential to create an up-to-date learning environment with benefits for all of the three stakeholder groups. These benefits can, for example, include university-industry experiences as well as social contacts for a successful career of students in industry, additional research funds for universities or introducing companies to new technologies. Therefore, a “Student-University-Industry (SUI) triad” may be a research framework that allows the consideration of all stakeholder interests.

Although there is a considerable amount of literature on motivation factors within a dyadic cooperation, i.e. between just two of the three stakeholders, there is little evidence about the specific triadic collaboration - the SUI-triad. As motivation is an essential factor of successful cooperation, we aim to find out what the concrete key motivation factors of the stakeholders are within an SUI-triad in order to successfully work together.

To learn more about these motivation factors, we interviewed five representatives of each stakeholder group. With the help of the information gained through those interviews, combined with information from similar studies in the literature, we were able to identify and classify a set of motivators for each of the three stakeholder groups. Accordingly, we identified the key motivation factors and separated them into three groups: “Economic Aspects”, “Social Aspects” and “Individual Development”. Based on that classification, an online survey in the surrounding of Austrian universities of technology was performed with a total of 310 participants and 265 completed questionnaires.

As a result this paper reports that students have the highest overall motivation to cooperate in SUI-triads, followed by universities and the industry, which seems to have the lowest motivation. It could be found that “Individual Development” is the most important motivation factor to all three stakeholder groups. “Social Aspects” have been ranked in second place and, surprisingly, “Economic Aspects” seem to be the least important motivation factor group.

Keywords:

Student-University-Industry Triad, Motivation, Cooperation.