Abstract:

There is an existing dilemma between Academy and Industry. On one hand, the academy has typically assumed the role of generating new knowledge as well as developing human resources in order to "ideally" fulfill Industry demands. On the other hand, industry needs are quite specific and somehow always changing according to the market environment in which they interact.

Are the Universities in Latin America presenting an adequate supply of knowledge and human resources to help industries on their innovation process? One might be tempted to the answer such a question as "No". Typical Latin American CEO´s opinion on this matter is that university programs generally fail to comply with industry needs as it is always necessary to provide specific training to the new graduates so that they may be capable of doing what they were meant to do since they left the University. In order to respond to such a criticism, Universities generally assemble departments of "University Extension", "Industry Link" or similar where the common practice is to allocate students into the industry for six months to one year programs where they have to stay at specific organizations in order to get the "know how" and ease the transition between university and industry. However, such solution is definitely not enough as the student’s perception on these programs is that they are hardly ever able to apply their recently acquired knowledge on their job. Also, the industry still has to get such students to undergo training investing organizational resources on their newly acquired professional trainees. Adding complexity to the problem, universities production of knowledge in the form of patents, publications or similar in most cases are useless to industry needs. Help on aligning university’s supply with industry’s demands is therefore essential and urgent.

Recent government programs together with a correct university´s organization have proved to be able to provide effective help on developing industries innovation capabilities using an appropriate university-to-industry interaction that is capable to evolve dynamically according the needs of society bringing students and professionals together under a learning space where they are both able to generate new knowledge whilst providing specific solutions to industry problems. In this paper we present a university structure model for innovation that has effectively respond to industry throughout the implementation of important changes on the way both university´s personnel and university´s fundamental structure are conceived. The work presented here shows that success on innovation can not only be achieved by expecting one university unit to act as a link between university and industry but rather important structural changes on university policies along with well formulated government programs are necessary to produce a desired impact on society.

Keywords:

Innovation, Triple helix, latin america, university.