Engagement, determinants and challenges: a multinational systematic review of education-focused university-industry collaborations

The role of education-focused university-industry collaboration (UIC) in facilitating higher education quality has been increasingly documented by empirical studies in the last decade, and yet existing systematic reviews of UIC are all focused on other non-education related aspects of collaboration, such as joint research, technology transfer, knowledge block building, or patent issues. This systematic review fills such a research gap by synthesising extant research on educational collaboration between the industry sector and higher education sector. Following the PRISMA guidelines, the authors searched literature across multiple databases and screened publications according to the following eligibility criteria: (1) publications should be peer-reviewed journal articles; (2) the publications should involve educational collaboration between the two sectors; (3) the content should provide information on at least one of the four major aspects, namely, the manifestations of industry’s involvement, the manifestations of higher education’s involvement, critical determinants of successful education-focused UICs, and the challenges or barriers to the implementation. Finally, a total of 65 qualified publications from 25 countries are included, from which seven types of industrial engagement, five types of universities’ engagement, five critical determinants, and four challenges to the implementation across the globe are synthesised. The findings and implications for practice and future research are discussed.