Abstract:

Nowadays employees of enterprises are encouraged to provide both their own competitiveness and the competitiveness of their enterprises on the global market. Enterprises need such results of scientific research work which give a “quick” output, i.e. are implemented in production, significantly improving the products manufactured or prepared for release. Furthermore, enterprises need young professionals (university graduates), who are ready to engage in the production of new or modernized goods without further preparation, and who are well aware of the production process (constructions, technology and logistics).

The problem is that graduates’ professional knowledge as well as the staff qualification in the overwhelming number of cases do not correspond to the high rate of technological development. The solution to this problem should involve all interested parties: students, teachers of technical subjects at universities and employees of enterprises. To solve this problem we propose a model, based on the integration of education, science and entrepreneurship in student training and professional development of academic staff and enterprise employees.

The main idea consists of involving academic staff, researchers, post-graduate, undergraduate university students and enterprise employees in cooperative research and development work during three years. Three years after the beginning of the project, the university team and the enterprise team (designers, technologists, testers, workers, managers) create a new prototype product, its entire design, technological and operational documentation, carry out all kinds of tests and create high-tech manufacturing of this product. Then the new product is commercially manufactured and sold.

The model has been verified in South Ural State University (National Research University). Eight projects on high-tech production of new products have been implemented. The experiment evaluated the results of the model implementation according to the following criteria: competences of project, engineering, technology and calculation activities; the number of intellectual property products created by students, academic staff and enterprise employees during the project implementation. To measure and detect the increments according to the specified criteria there have been developed assessment scales.

During the experiment, which lasted for 3 years (2013 – 2016), intermediate and final measurements of the achieved results were held according to the specified criteria with the use of methods of studying activity products, analysis of documentation and expert evaluation. The result showed statistical significance of the received increments for all criteria. Thus, the hypothesis of a qualitative and rapid growth of students’ professional knowledge and staff professional qualification in the course of designing and creating high-tech production of technical products has been experimentally proved.

Keywords:

Education, science, entrepreneurship, teaching, professional development, students, academic staff, professionals.