BLOG POST

by Dr. Pietro Borsano, Pongsatorn Pichayakorn, and Shengyuan Jiangzhang.

Dr. Pietro Borsano is Deputy Executive Director, Industrial and Global Alliances, & Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship & Core Business, Pongsatorn Pichayakorn and Shengyuan Jiangzhang are ScII third-year students.

It\'s the end of April 2021, after almost one full year of stay-at-home orders and related restrictions. Six Thai and international student teams eagerly await a virtual Zoom room to deliver presentations to a management committee of a leading Thai energy conglomerate. This presentation goes beyond a theoretical analysis; it addresses actual business pain points. The very corporate leaders who will decide how to address them are currently evaluating the student\'s work.

Due to the difficult Covid-19 pandemic, many activities have been restricted over the past three years. It was no different in academia.

Despite being entirely online, education offerings could experiment with out-of-the-box approaches, made more accessible by online delivery; for example, integrating partner company contributions into their revamped curriculum.

Back to April 2021, students’ presentation was only the final step of a long journey. During the semester, students were challenged to develop the most innovative marketing strategy to distribute solar panels to rural Thailand during a marketing project competition sponsored by the Thai energy provider. As students collaborated to find new ways to achieve their objectives, their eagerness, passion, and perseverance were palpable. The event served as a first-rate example of what industry-academia cooperation can succeed in delivering substantial academic exchange opportunities and addressing practical industrial challenges.

The umbrella of industry-academia cooperation encompasses many initiatives, including internship programs, corporate hackathons, coursework projects, and capstone industry projects.

To showcase the use cases of consulting and R&D projects – which contributed to Chulalongkorn University\'s overall ranking under SDG9 – one of the faculties that employs this approach is the School of Integrated Innovation (ScII) in its Bachelor of Arts and Science in Integrated Innovation (BAScii) programme. ScII is the latest and only fully international English-language school at Chulalongkorn University, which provides a transdisciplinary platform for students from around the world to access the technical and entrepreneurial tools and acquire the 21st-century skills that are necessary for them to engage in real-world collaborations.

In internships, students are provided job and field training by both private and public organisations, depending on their areas of study. As a result, interns are exposed to real-time business operations, learn how different businesses operate, expand their knowledge, improve their interpersonal and communication skills, and develop their ethical and moral principles.

Collaborations between companies and universities through corporate hackathons can encourage young generations to work on real-life products, operations, and sustainable business models. Additionally, these events foster the seeding of collaborative innovations and promote entrepreneurial innovations.

\"B.Hack\" was a hackathon jointly organized by ScII and Banpu in 2022 to address corporate pain points using students\' creativity in innovative ways. A major goal of the hackathon was to help Banpu automate its business processes, implement its internal logistic platforms, and improve employee engagement and work-life balance.

Smart-thinking and smart-practicing are vital components of future professional blueprints, and these project-based learning programmes truly enabled ScII students to practice these abilities during these courses. For coursework and capstone industry projects, partners of ScII (including SCB10X, aCommerce, Banpu, WHAUP, Singha, and BOL) have mentioned that project-based learning programmes allowed the students to practice applying their \"smart\" skills effectively. These include all the skills that \"are co-developed in collaboration with humans as they require constant social interaction, engagement, and intense reflection\", as Prof. Loredana Padurean, the author of \"The Job is Easy, The People are Not!\" puts it.

ScII can leverage these many examples of industry-academia collaboration to supplement its R&D activities, especially as its professors and researchers increase and as its ties with other research-oriented institutions deepen.

Furthermore, besides the many industrial collaborations in which ScII currently participates, joint organization of academic projects with other institutions has also been another core objective at ScII through partnerships with globally renowned research centres and institutions. This helps strengthen ScII\'s core disciplines and concentration areas to serve Thai firms to grow their R&D capabilities in automation, intelligent manufacturing, and healthcare, all target industries by the Thai Government\'s master plan to make Thailand a knowledge-based economy.

ScII also has a partnership with UC Berkeley, SCET, which provides corporate executives with seats in Silicon Valley executive training and networking events that ScII industry partners can attain.

It has been the core mission of ScII to promote innovation and technology-based entrepreneurship in students and faculty members. The collaboration of industrial and academic institutions furthers that mission through various initiatives that have produced extensive results. These partnerships are instrumental in advancing research and creating a skilled workforce to steer change and create an impact in the Thai and Southeast Asian economies.

READ ALSO: Our Previous Blogpost \"Humans are Predictive Animals, some are Better at it than Others\"