Abstract
The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (1996) chaired by Lord Dearing envisioned a university sector central to the UK's knowledge-based economy. With successive government support the university-business partnership ideology has been put into practice. Widening participation has increased in emphasis over recent years, providing key innovations and skills to support business growth. Yet business schools activities in business growth is marginal against other university schools. The paper reports on an empirical study analyzing the university/business values derived from one small business engagement project. Data collected through semi-structured interviews, observations, memos, and discussions were coupled with critical evaluation of work and action-based learning (ABL) literature. Analysis reveals evidence of multiple value adding factors; it emerged that the existence of knowledge, present or generated through blended learning techniques, was a key value adding element. The findings enabled the construction of a universal process model providing a project framework, detailing areas of collaborative efforts and associated recompenses; this included ease in project advancements and a noticeably advanced project outcome. The study highlights these values in terms of individual and organizational learning, originality and quality of outputs. Given the growing importance of Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to the UK economy, understanding the value co-created by collaborative projects in delivering both work-based and ABL for graduates/students, academics and enterprise management is important.
Highlights
The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (1996) chaired by Lord Dearing envisioned a university sector central to the UK’s knowledge-based economy
Three subsequent models have been developed to explore the relationships of management stage values, learning theories employed and the associated values derived from such a learning framework
The findings suggest that they recognised the importance of Action-based Learning (ABL) and Work-Based Learning (WBL) which are in most cases, fairly new practical learning methods to most graduate researchers
Summary
The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (1996) chaired by Lord Dearing envisioned a university sector central to the UK’s knowledge-based economy. Policy makers recognise that ‘the economic and social prosperity of the UK depends on a healthy knowledge-based economy’. This became a catalyst for new collaborative commercial approaches. Literature previously identified universities as an integral part of the skills and innovations supply chain to business, one which has the capacity to introduce and support business growth and economic affluence. Even though widening participation has increased in emphasis over recent years, the majority of Business Schools (BS) still hold-out on directly engaging in university-business collaborations due to associated difficulties. This paper proposes that rather than micro/small-business engagement being a side-line or marginal activity, it should instead take centre stage, for economic prosperity and for knowledge transfer, graduate prospects and local business development
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