Abstract:

Effective collaboration between academia and industry is crucial for driving innovation and advancing engineering research and development (R&D) and has a crucial role in the educational pathway of ‘work ready’ research postgraduates. In recent years, national and international organisations which fund engineering research in the academic domain have put greater emphasis on industrial collaboration to increase the potential for the implementation and commercialisation of research outcomes. While this has led to a greater level of collaboration, it has highlighted the differing R&D methodologies present in industrial versus academic research projects.

In industrial engineering, R&D often focuses on short to medium-term projects, tackling specific challenges with innovative techniques, the outcomes of which accumulate to create major breakthroughs and transformative technologies in the long term. This format is driven by commercial needs, where short-term outcomes are required to generate revenue to ensure continuity of company and the R&D team. Academic research more often takes a different format, where a single broad-ranging research question is posed, followed by a rigid literature review, design, test/experimentation and results, towards a single advancement of the state-of-the-art. Having traditionally been supported by both tenured academics and long-term university and government grants, the time constraints for tangible outputs are not as pronounced and the commercially viable/lucrative outcomes are rarely the focus.

This paper proposes an academic research process and thesis format which more closely aligns with industrial engineering R&D goals and timelines, while also addressing the requirements and rigor of academic study and postgraduate learning outcomes leading to major award, M.Eng. or PhD. It describes the careful design of discrete short-form research ‘Case Studies’, which represent both a standalone piece of research with a tangible output and a stepping stone towards a solution to a larger research question. With this methodology, the academic research process can be integrated directly with the industrial R&D process, creating a more embedded approach to the collaboration, while maintaining the rigor and research excellence required within the academic domain. The proposed format also lends itself to flexibility in the research programme, allowing candidates to pause work and exit at masters level or continue work and progress to PhD level without major changes to the research structure.

Keywords:

Postgraduate research, Industrial collaboration, research programme structure.