Cannot be Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

New Indian Express

27-07-2025

The hallmark of a knowledge economy is the strong industry-academia linkage that has shared vision for research, innovation and workforce development. The multiple options to initiate, strengthen and sustain industry-academia partnerships is one of the biggest challenges. Many higher education institutions (HEIs) are wanting to engage intensely with industry unaware of their limitations, while many industry players collaborate with only a few HEIs due to lack of proper match. This imbalance in this critical dimension of higher education needs a thorough analysis to understand ground realities, mitigate challenges and reinforce the partnership through multi-modal arrangements between industry and academia with government agencies being the progressive facilitator. The need to enrich knowledge-based capital, both for industry competitiveness and to address socio-economic challenges, benefits those universities and industries with genuine intent to forge partnership for a sustainable co-existence resulting in a win-win for both.
The policy stress on Industry-Academia Collaboration is tellingly visible through various inter-ministerial schemes that lay emphasis on the need to promote a sense of cooperation between these two important stakeholders of a knowledge economy. The Research Fellowship, Sector Skills Council, National Apprenticeship Scheme and other schemes of UGC, AICTE, etc. like Professor of Practice, Apprenticeship Embedded Degree Programme, NCVET recognitions, etc. are aligned with the central objective to get industry and academia together on multiple pathways based on each other's strengths and expertise.
Leading institutions like the IITs, IIMs, CFTIs and certain progressive private HEIs have a functional mechanism to promote industry partnership in different ways—research, entrepreneurship and innovation, capacity building, faculty development, continuing education, etc. This has proven to be mutually beneficial resulting in successful outcomes—joint publications, incubation and startups, workforce development, industry talent development, etc. However, there are challenges in scaling due to lack of coherent synergy and disinterest in widespread adoption.