Proposed Strategies for Improving Academia and Industry Collaboration

Sustainable national development is determined by a country's economic development, its people's mind-set and their capabilities. Accordingly, an infrequent, minimised frequency of seminar discussions and conferences on research findings by both academia and industry, not only retards the rate of collaboration between the two, but grossly hampers a nation's economic development as well as people's standard of living. ! critical review of literature and observations underlined the challenges faced in the potential collaboration of academia and industry in Zimbabwe. These include, a varied perception of research findings, misdirected national scholarships, limited opportunities for local academic publications, a few lecturer entrepreneurs, great variation between practice and theory of basic business concepts and business practices abating the guiding philosophy of unhu/Ubuntu. The conclusion drawn was that, solving socio-economic problems through research by academia and industry takes second place to acknowledging unethical business conduct, which in fact deters academia and industry from collaborating with each other. It is advanced that to effectively promote the academia-industry collaboration, there is need to significantly increase the national research budgets and local on line publication opportunities for researchers. Other measures include implementing government policies designed to allow college and university lecturers run enterprises, increasing funding of technical entrepreneurship education, a well-balanced, transparent disbursement of local national scholarships and the creation of media space for nationwide discussions on research findings. Ultimately, the glue for the academia-industry collaboration lies in encouraging localised seminar discussions on research findings by students on attachment, their college and company supervisors, culminating in conferences for academia and industry.