Carisma completes a successful week in Idaho (USA) - Setting up transatlantic collaboration with industry and academia
Carisma's CEO was invited as a guest of Boise State University to spend a week in intense working sessions and meetings with key players in Boise's industrial and academic arenas.
The main theme for the week's work was Industry-Academia Collaboration. The main objectives were to:
- Kick off a research project between Marco and Prof. Nancy K. Napier, Director of the University Center for Creativity and Innovation. The research project aims to understand how to increase the social impact of management research and how to bridge the gap between industry and academia.
- Explore existing models of industry - academia collaboration on-going in Boise: we had a very interesting session with Michael Wojcicki, executive director at TechHelp (www.techhelp.org), and with prof. Kirk Smith, Associate Dean, Grad Studies and Executive Education
The whole week was an incredible success: the several amazing people we met and work with, provided a lot of inputs and good ideas. It was refreshing to see such a large industrial community so very keen to collaborate with the local University and at the same time to meet so many academics from the local University eager and capable of working with industry.
Path Shannon, Dean of the College of Business and Economics, and his team clearly understand the role a University should play (both for what concerns education and research) and there is a lot to learn from Boise State University: this is one of a very few and rare examples of how industry and academia can successfully work together to exploit the peculiar characteristics of the local context to push the boundaries of theoretical and practical innovation.
Our thanks to Prof. Nancy K. Napier, Director of the University Center for Creativity and Innovation, for making this possible.