Higher education, institutions and industry collaboration for technology development in Thailand

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the development of collaboration between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and industry; to indicate the factors affecting the successful collaboration among them and the problem related to collaboration. The data were collected from only HEls perspective, using mail survey and interview with selected universities management. The analysis of data collected shown that the collaboration between HEls and industry came mainly from the personal contact of each other and went through the granted projects from other government departments. Factors leading to successful collaboration included those government policies promoted linkage among them, well setting of common goals and benefit of works, and providing efficient and effort communication. Nevertheless, there still existed some problems and constraints like conflict of interest between industry and academia, business secret, and bureaucratic read tape and lacking of the government support. The weak management and marketable skill.s of academics lead to the problems of commercialization of research results.