Modelling the ‘Bridge’: Research Verification and Validation

Despite rapid and dynamic changes in technology and the disruptive but necessary innovations orchestrated by the fourth Industrial Revolution that required the production of goods and services in industry to be driven by technology and knowledge transfer from tertiary institutions, the gap between academia and industry remained wide. This has been attributed to several reasons including the shortages and mismatch of skills between those produced by universities and those required by industry. This book focuses on research carried out in Southern Africa to address these challenges using systems thinking modelling as detailed in the previous chapters. This is the penultimate chapter that integrates the various sub-models to universally model the bridge between academia and industry under the broad categories of technology, training and policies. The case studies used in the book and indeed this chapter were derived from institutions and industries collaborating under the Southern Africa Engineering Education Network (SAE²Net). The various avenues proposed in the book were verified and validated for their usefulness and the impact they had on bringing industry closer to academia.