Thoughts on how visit informed Cox. By Ken Newton

Closer Links should be established between Universities and SMEs
Money seems high on the agenda with companies looking to get new insights and associated IPR from the universities. They also look to employ the best graduates and value them sufficiently to increment their salaries heavily. They get better response from universities and their students through high value competitions. Companies effectively sponsor universities so will want to ensure that links are strong to protect their investment. The ways in which students can get experience of a company and its practices seem better developed in terms of internships and co-operatives.


Higher education courses should better prepare students to work with and understand other specialists
There is obviously a strong emphasis on team working and the idea of T shaped people who are better prepared to work in teams. This appears to happen primarily at postgraduate level but a wider analysis would be helpful. The taking of two degrees, simultaneously, in two different disciplines seemed common, rather than degrees that were major / minor. In terms of students getting input from different areas in a structured way, particularly with reference to creative (design in this case) courses was not obvious but closer inspection of curricula may clarify. Most programs that we saw had a class that involved students from different academic backgrounds working as a team. Organising timetables was cited as a problem even for only one class. D School on the other hand is populated by people from different disciplines who are in fact chosen to come on the course, in part, by their background.
A common criterion was that graduates should be able to understand the language of other disciplines so as to be able to understand connections at a planning meeting or similar.

Centres of excellence should be established for multidisciplinary courses combining management studies, engineering and technology and the creative arts
I suppose the best example of this we saw was at North Western in Chicago. The structure allowed the coverage of 23 subjects over two years, with classes geared to the students needs – Turbo Finance was an example of a 5 week class covering the area. They used part time staff to deliver certain elements of the course who themselves had experience of multidisciplinary work through their other work. One wonders how much the creative aspects impact on the other areas, if at all, and whether the program is mainly for potential business leaders who just want a grasp of all areas of New Product Development.