Business School-Industry Linkage: Experience from Adama University

A paradigm shift is now underway that promotes new patterns of collaboration among industry consortia, university linkages and government agencies, with an emphasis on the integration of commercialization, empirical knowledge and the public good. Moreover, a triple helix of overlapping spheres of university-industry-government is a process increasingly at the core, rather than the periphery, of national, regional, and multinational innovation systems (Etzkowitz, 2003). The study is an attempt to identify the current status of business school-industry linkages, the barriers for the interaction and the possible conditions for sustainable interaction from both academic and industry perspectives. To investigate the area under study, two different sets of questionnaire were distributed for both the academic and industry staff. The data were analyzed using percentage, mean, standard deviation and factor analysis. Accordingly, important variables were suggested as barriers and as preconditions for sustainable interaction between the Business School and the Industry. The theoretical nature of teaching that has little focus on problems of industry, lack of autonomy to work with the industry, lack of confidence to carry out research, lack of motivation and entrepreneurial spirit among academics, and lack of clear information for industries on the responsible people/office who handle the Industry-School linkages in the school are some of the barriers. Setup of mechanism to link universities with industries which can act as an intermediary between universities and industry and giving more autonomy to the academic staff to is selected as a prime-precondition for sustainable interaction. Finally, conclusion and recommendations were suggested based on the barriers and suggestions as cited by the respondents and believed to overcome the problems