Academia and Industry Collaborations: A Research and Professional Perspective

While collaborations between polytechnics and industry existed and were well pronounced in the earlier revolutions where apprenticeship training was key to driving industry, the relationship between industry and universities was not well pronounced. The transformations in the engineering education sector, especially from the third to the fourth Industrial Revolution, saw the introduction of industrial attachments for both the traditional and technical universities. This was partly in response to the demands for appropriate skills due to the fourth Industrial Revolution and it was also meant to address the gap created by the conversion of polytechnics to universities. This chapter focusses on the collaborations between various tertiary institutions, both the traditional and technical universities, and industry partners in Southern Africa from 2011 to 2020, in order to establish effectiveness of such relationships and how this could be synthesised and modelled using systems thinking for repeatability and sustainability in capacity building in order to bridge the gap between academia and industry.