The Industry Academia Partnership Programme aims to build strong and structured partnerships between higher education institutions and locally based industry, focussed around bilateral academic and industry exchanges. These placements improve university curricula and enhance knowledge transfer into industry to enhance prospects for long term economic development within the partner country.

As a critical interface in the delivery of new technologies and innovations, a strong partnership between academia and industry is vital for economic development and growth. In an era of rapid technological advancement, it is also essential that engineering education keeps up with the ever changing demands of industry, to ensure that graduates have the skills and knowledge required by future employers. More broadly, it is clear that engineers, through advances in technology, have a major role to play in addressing key global challenges, such as sustainability, clean energy, food security, and climate change resilience. The Industry Academia Partnership Programme aims to build strong and structured partnerships between higher education institutions and locally based industry, focussed around bilateral academic and industry exchanges. These placements improve university curricula and enhance knowledge transfer into industry to enhance prospects for long term economic development within the partner country. This is done by: (i) Promote the sharing of knowledge and creation of mutually beneficial partnerships between HEIs and industry, to inform current and future engineering research and facilitate its impact in practice; (ii) Enhance teaching curricula and methods within HEIs to promote practice led, industrially relevant learning, to improve engineering skills among graduates and ensure they meet the needs of local industry; (iii) Enhance teaching curricula and methods to promote innovation focused learning and technology entrepreneurship, to promote innovation capacity among engineering graduates; (iv) Promote, more broadly, international sharing of knowledge and best practice in engineering education and support for innovation between HEIs in the UK and Newton partner countries.