Abstract:

Zayed University was established in 1998 by the federal government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to educate U.A.E. Emirati national women. The university is named after the founding President of the U.A.E., His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan. It has two main campuses in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, offering similar programs on both campuses to approximately three thousand five hundred U.A.E. Emirati national women. The university has five colleges namely: Business Sciences, Arts & Sciences, Communication & Media Sciences, Information Technology and Education (www.zu.ac.ae).

This paper researches the experiences and benefits of both business students of Zayed University’s Dubai campus, (specializing in marketing), and industry personnel who worked together over two semesters on two industry research projects. These two marketing research projects, one in advertising and the other in consumer behavior were created and provided by two organizations namely: The Brand Union and La Reine. Students majoring in marketing in 2009 and 2010 and studying the courses Advertising and Promotion and Consumer Behavior worked closely with the respective organizations on the projects which were then assessed by the organizations and Professor Ian Michael, these contributed to around 30% of the courses’ final mark.

In their research, Wang and Lu (2007) proposed that university-industry interactions, developed an entrepreneurial spirit within the university, and for industry it implemented Professors of Practice. Doing this has been recognized as vital for building and maintaining effective university-industry interactions. Szulanski (1996), mentions a lack of in-depth study on the process of knowledge transfer between university and industry, in particular how knowledge is transferred across institutional boundaries. One primary aim of this paper is to investigate the value and importance of marketing knowledge that was transferred between students and the two organizations and vice-versa.

According to Cockburn and Henderson, (1998) developing interactive relations with university to access and absorb new knowledge has become an important strategy for firms in the knowledge-based economy. On another note, Garrick, Chan and Lai (2006), stress that at times the real life problems that students’ encounter from industry, are far more meaningful than any carefully worked up examples that they might read in a textbook, or have explained by a tutor in a university classroom.

Etzkowitz, Webster and Healy (1998) stress that promoting new forms of research communication and collaboration between universities and industry has become a key aim of research and innovation policies in many OECD countries, however relatively little research has addressed on the various collaboration strategies used during University/Industry collaboration. Most research to date on university/industry collaboration and interaction has been conducted in a Western business environment (Bjerregaard, 2009), hence this paper would be interesting, provide unique insights, and possibly the first of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.