Business and Academia Collaboration: Empowering Internationalization in Albania

Abstract

Global and European challenges have shift dynamic expectations from universities, going beyond ‘centers of knowledge’, towards the urge of producing sustainable research and innovation that impact communities. Despite of taking care of ‘producing’ professionalism, there is a strong need inside academia to ask business collaboration in order to catch up the new developments and be competitive in the trade market. Positioning the field of research into the session of Educational Globalization ‘Higher Education Internalization, curricula and methodologies’ is a possibility to find out current and updated resources or even new policy strategies on how to adapt synergies into the terms of globalization and European challenges ahead for academia. This research aims to explore and analyze the current European practice of collaboration between business sector and universities and offer proper alternatives to be embraced from Albanian universities activity. Based on the findings of European Commission, there are less universities (more than half) rather than business organizations that demonstrate cooperation (72 %). Does this mean that business sector is more willing to get closer with academia? It is courageous that both universities and business sector demonstrate more than average the will to smartly collaborate within this dimension. It is interesting that among all the high number of legal acts and policy level documents of EU, there is none that explicitly treats UBC (University Business Cooperation) as a specific policy or issue. Having a specific policy document into EU level that can envisage this pattern, will strongly put this issue into the proper spotlight of the understanding and potentially could encourage both of the structures to raise proper attention to UBC. Also, having a separate document on UBC can produce sustainable impact, bringing this not as a sporadic solution, but prompting sustainable results for business, academia and the community. The vague position of UBC into European policy making is not in the same line with successful histories of European universities that have established on their own initiative different level of collaboration. High-ranking universities in Europe have a lot to learn from good models and practices in this area. There is no need to wait for the national, regional or European document that can treat collaboration between university and academia. Universities can be the first initiators of getting closer to business sector in order to strengthen capacity building, research and innovation. Despite of this context, there are a lot of good examples that European universities have established by their own being empowered through business sector connection. Received: 25 December 2023 / Accepted: 25 February 2024 / Published: 23 April 2024