The Growing Role of Community and Industry Partnership in Higher Education – Evolllution

Sep 3, 2024

Community and industry engagement activities are designed to initiate and steward relationships with external partners. At higher educational institutions, these activities occur whenever we welcome a visitor, hold a community event, give a lab tour, host a career fair, update our websites, post to social media and more; not to mention faculty, staff and others’ thousands of Zooms, emails and phone calls with external partners every day. The number and nature of these activities are hard to overstate. At the University of Arizona, more than 600 faculty have had a research project with an industry component over the last five years, and over 100 staff members have community or industry engagement as part of their job duties, all of which involve substantial time and effort.

So, it’s important to appreciate the ways in which your higher ed colleagues engage with external partners, whether your institution operates with a top-down approach, a decentralized style or something in between, to understand who talks to partners and how those partners may be relevant to your unit’s mission.

I sit within the research enterprise and, at the risk of oversimplifying, my unit’s activities are primarily geared toward securing funding that supports research. However, the interests in community and industry engagement across campus are much broader and often have nothing to do with revenue, as colleagues work to find student internships and develop careers, license technologies, spin out companies, assist local startups, fund athletics, seek philanthropic donations, build community awareness and support agricultural and indigenous communities as the state’s land-grant institution.

Read More: https://evolllution.com/the-growing-role-of-community-and-industry-partnership-in-higher-education