UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIPS

Summary This paper focuses on highlighting the importance of partnerships between industry and academia. The aim of higher education and university-industry partnership is to produce future managers, business leaders, scientists, engineers, researchers, professors, etc., who are active to play their due role in the nation building process. However, in Pakistan, this partnership has not been very encouraging so far. That said, the business curriculum, across most of the universities, has no direct or very limited relevance to the real world problems and graduates in most cases don‟t come up to the expectation of industry. As a consequence of availability of poor quality of faculty, the teaching pedagogy has remained weak to finding solutions of the real world problems. However, universities also argue that industry, at the same time, has also shown resentment in allowing academia to interact freely with them; the blame game continuous. Scope of the study The scope of the paper is, however, limited to discussing the issues related to business education and designing of curriculum. The proposed research is surely expected to enhance the university-industry partnerships. The main aim of this research is to improve any potential mismatch within the market. This research aims at discovering the heart of the problem that is impeding the business involvement with the education. Universities can amply benefit from the proposed research as well as businesses and open new communication platforms.