Industrial Briefs for Student Projects - A Company Perspective

The use of industry collaborative projects is clearly widespread across Europe, America and Australia, in particular, and much has been written about the use of industrial or ‘live’ briefs for undergraduate projects within design and engineering courses in Higher Education. Generally, these papers have understandably concentrated on the learning experiences, benefits and difficulties from the perspective of the undergraduates working on the project. There is evidence of a ‘growing interest’ from companies in being involved in these kind of projects. However, the drivers for the industrial partner to desire to become involved with a higher education design project have a significant impact on that project. Thus, this paper focuses on industry collaborative projects from the perspective of the industrial partner. The paper is based on the experiences of one industrial partner working with two HEIs using a shared project brief over two academic years. The paper discusses the drivers from the perspective of the industrial partner regarding the desire to offer such a brief in the first instance and then expand the collaboration to include a second HEI and on the perceived benefits of such a collaboration. The study reports on a number of interviews with different stakeholders within the industry partner and HEIs involved.