Teaching a practice-oriented course: Implications for industry-academia collaboration

We often hear the critique that academic education is too theoretical and distant from the real world. Today, I would like to share my experience on teaching a practice-oriented course with some takeaways hopefully to narrow the gap between the industry and academia in terms of sharing knowledge and experience.

Let me first explain the setup and then I will discuss the takeaways:

Setup

Last block, I taught the New Business Development Course to master students at Rotterdam School of Management. This course was unique in the sense that there was no lecture but student teams were assigned to company projects from day one. A couple of months before the course starts, I approached a number of companies with a brief explanation of the course and its setup. Interestingly most companies said yes and I arranged 17 projects from 15 companies to collaborate with.

Moreover, companies agreed to assign company mentors to teams who promised to spend at least two hours per week for teams. In practice, given their interests and presenting a real challenge, company mentors spent more time which helped to increase the quality of the course.

Additionally, there were no lectures given in the course but we arranged several brief facilitation sessions (15-20 minutes for each team) that helped to understand their progress and helped students to discuss their challenges. We also invited a few company mentors to give a guest lecture in the course to students.

Takeaways

Overall, the experience was really interesting for me and I think also very insightful for students (student evaluations are yet to be arrived) with the following implications:

• Real world business challenges are different (often much more complex) from class assignments. The real world is uncontrollable in the sense that we depend on others to respond and to provide data/insights and even sometimes the data does not exist at all.
• In real world (entrepreneurial) projects like these, we can only plan the next couple of steps and the whole trajectory is unknowable. So, an agile structure with sprints of two weeks or so could be a useful structure for student teams.
• Designing one-size-fits-all trajectory (or assignment structure) for student teams is very difficult and probably impossible. As the course coordinator, you need to be flexible and honest that you might not know the answer to all their questions.
• For companies, often projects that seem interesting but do not fall in their core activity could be suitable for such a course: something they are interested to explore but do not have much time for.?
• Moreover, I noticed that one of company “gains” is to present themselves to students as a future potential employer given the tight labor market we witness these days.
• Lastly, I have always been a believer in academia-university collaboration and its numerous benefits for both sides. I believe that this collaboration is beneficial for everyone including companies provided that the framework is to some extent clear and company mentors are willing to spend time and provide some input for the project to students.

?I am sure a lot can be improved with respect to this course. If you are interested to discuss more about the experience and how we can increase the chances of success of academia-industry collaborations, let me know!?