Högskolan i Skövde

In a knowledge based economy, manufacturing industry has to continuously improve their operations, processes and develop their employees in order to remain competitive in the market.

In this context, the collaboration between industry and universities becomes of vital importance. Universities and industry have traditionally maintained fairly informal or lose ways of cooperation when it comes to education. This article presents a fruitful cooperation which has been established between the University of Skövde, the Industrial Development Center in the region, IDC West Sweden AB, and the manufacturing industry.

The paper describes the development, lessons learned and the outcome of more than 3 years’ experience of close collaboration between the different stakeholders. It presents a methodology, used by the consortium to help manufacturing industries to improve their competiveness using a well defined process including: a company analysis, applied education and long-term coaching. A special focus is put on a long-term commitment by all partners. This alliance has performed more than 140 company analysis, conducted applied education for more than 2500 employees from more than 120 companies and performed coaching of more than 80 companies on site. The trend is that these figures will increase over time.

The established collaboration has been strengthened over this period of time by a number of shared research projects. One of these projects involves an evaluation of the impact that this presented consortium has had on the region´s industry. Lean Learning Academies is another project that has been funded by the European Union within the Lifelong Learning Program, with the aim to increase the competitiveness of European companies and enhance the employability of students.