Building Industry-Academia Partnerships that Foster Organizational Learning Models

Corporations often adopt learning models based on their needs for professional development, which are closely tied to their current or future strategic initiatives. Also, to maintain competitive advantage, organizations must remain flexible and nimble in their training strategy that would quickly change their learning models based on immediate business needs. Partnering academic institutions should also carefully analyze and understand the strategic initiatives of these organizations before and during the training, and thus contribute to the partners’ growth and prosperity. For the past 37 years, the University of Kansas has been partnering with major national and international corporations to deliver customized professional engineering and management trainings. In this paper, the authors discuss the strategies they have used in (1) understanding an organization’s strategic initiatives that strengthens its competitive advantage, (2) developing tailored curriculum based on the organizational learning needs and an organization's existing and future projects, and (3) modifying the training portfolio and technology-enhanced delivery methods as corporate learning strategies changed with globalization. Three long-standing collaborations with three organizations -an engineering, consulting and construction company, an aircraft manufacturer and a flight control components manufacturer -with different organizational learning models are used as examples with special focus on simultaneous delivery of customized training to globally distributed teams.