Collaboration between academia and industry: A change in approach

In industry, up to 40% of an IS budget can be spent on Storage technology, making it the fastest growing segment of IT/IS. While industry has recognised the need to diffuse this technology, academia has been slow to respond to this diffusion need. Universities are not teaching courses in this area and a variety of reasons are presented ranging from lack of skills, to bureaucratic delays, to cost (the cost of installing a Storage system for use by students is a massive expenditure well beyond the budgets of most IS academic departments).This chapter concentrates on the lack of skills (knowledge barriers in the parlance of diffusion of innovation theory) and examines ways to overcome this. The knowledge skills are present in industry, so collaboration between industry and academia is a suggested solution. Collaboration between industry and academia, though, is fraught with problems. The aim of this research therefore is to examine how this collaboration can be effective. Interestingly, the result of this research suggests true collaboration is not the solution, but a win-win situation is still possible for all stakeholders.