The Need for Partnership Between the University and Industry: Nigerian Perspective

Abstract

Background: Partnership between the university and the industry is now seen as an inevitable vehicle for the modern world's knowledge-driven innovative and competitive socio-economic and technological milieu. Description: The traditional role and stereotyping of the university as only academic and the industry as profit-based is no longer sustainable in light of the emergence of a worldwide knowledge-based economy driven by world-leading research universities in symbiosis with an industrial sector that thrives on innovative knowledge exchange. Lessons learned: The world's developed economies have increasingly sustained university-industry collaborations for socio-economic growth, but the same cannot be said of West African countries, especially Nigeria. Myriads of developmental challenges currently facing Nigeria, not least of which is unemployment, especially the issue of unemployable university graduates and the depletion of the manufacturing/industrial sector. Conclusion: This paper aims to identify the developmental issues that call for the urgent need for university-industry partnership, as a socio-economic and technological development vehicle.