Industrial Networking through Academic Cooperation

Modern industrial clusters represent a complex of various companies and enterprises engaged in the same branch of industry; they unite their efforts to achieve common goals and complement each other. A cluster approach is popular in the leading industrial regions of Russia. This paper focuses on the internationalization practices of a Russian regional petrochemical cluster which combines oil refining, processing, and oil producing companies, as well as technical and industrial parks, universities and research institutions. The goal of this cluster of organizations is to produce research that can be applied to real-life situations in the petrochemical industry. Today the strategic goal of the cluster development is to broaden its international networking into the Asia-Pacific region, where Vietnam was selected as one of the targeted countries for integration with industry due to active regional and national agreements and projects. Here we should mention that 40 percent of crude oil and around 25 percent of natural gas Vietnamese companies produce together with their Russian partners. In this respect the need for qualitative engineers for joint projects attains greater importance. However, a general problem the cluster faces is the need for successful approaches for Asia. The reason is that efficient practices for Europe had poor effect in Asia-Pacific as different intercultural aspects and various details had to be considered to ensure success. This paper describes new practices which have been implemented to solve this problem. First, a Russian research university engaged in research for the cluster was selected as a site which helps the cluster with challenging process of internationalization. Next, a representative office of this Russian university was established in Vietnam to balance cultural, linguistic, psychological, and administrative issues. This office employs Vietnamese graduates of this university and coordinates cooperation between Russian and Vietnamese partners. The paper explains a novel approach for arranging international networking in industry through establishing academic linkages between educational and research centers. The authors show a step-by-step process of this networking, including the visit of Russian regional authorities to Vietnam to overcome administrative barriers, cooperation of Russian and Vietnamese engineering universities, joint research, and as a result joint industrial projects negotiated by the leaders of the industrial companies during the visit of the cluster companies to Vietnam.