China’s University-Industry Partnership, Cooperative Education, and Entrepreneurship Education in a Global Context

As two basic parts of a society, university and industry sectors respectively take up important missions for social development and progress. Universities and industry have been collaborating for over a century, but the rise of a global knowledge economy has intensified the need for strategic partnerships that go beyond the traditional pattern of discrete projects. Bold, visionary partnerships between industry and universities can accelerate innovation and help deliver solutions to pressing social challenges. To harness such tandem, collaborations with industry should be linked to a redefinition of the role of the university in the 21st century. That role now extends beyond technology transfer to tackling key social challenges and helping drive economic growth together. A new vision should include producing the highly skilled workforce for a knowledge-based economy. The university-industry partnership in the 21st century should be viewed not just as a generator of innovations but also as a channel of knowledge and competence that can effectively benefit the society.

Arguably, there are two educational areas in which university-industry partnership is of crucial importance, and both are vital to a knowledge-based economy. One is cooperative education, and the other is entrepreneurship education. Cooperative education in universities and colleges is a structured method of combining classroom-based education with practical work experience. A cooperative education experience provides academic credit for structured job experience. (Groenewald 2004). In the context of a knowledge-based economy, cooperative education now takes on new importance in helping students to make the school-to-work transition, and build experiential learning initiatives (Grosjean 2003; Haddara and Skanes 2008). In this regard, Canada is commonly regarded as the leader in terms of offering co-op education in postsecondary stage (Axelrod, Anisef, and Lin 2003; Tamburri 2014), and is even termed a “hot bed” of cooperative education (Reid 2010). Naturally, many countries including China look to Canada for inspirations and experiences in regard to planning and implementing cooperative education in universities and colleges.

Entrepreneurship is the process of creating and implementing innovative ideas to address economic opportunities or social problems, whether that is through enterprise creation, improved product development or a new mode of organization (Wilson et al. 2009). Similar to co-op education, entrepreneurship has been taught at universities and colleges for over a century, from intensive business and technology training seminars for the self-employed farmers of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, to the first dedicated university entrepreneurship course for business students one hundred years later (Katz 2003). However, over the past three decades a series of new social and economic drivers have brought entrepreneurship education to the forefront of the agendas of postsecondary institutions and public policymakers. Although the teaching of entrepreneurship emerged in earnest during the 1970s among a handful of universities, today it is not uncommon to find at least one entrepreneurship education course at almost any university or college (Kuratko 2014). Now, entrepreneurship education courses not only help students learn to run a business but, more importantly, help develop creative thinking, innovative capacity, and improvement in self-esteem and responsibility (Heinonen, Kovalainen and Pukkinen 2006), which in turn ushers in rising demands and new challenges for entrepreneurship education. China is not immune from this trend, and features a largely top-down government-initiated approach to infusing entrepreneurship education and cooperative education into programs in universities and colleges.

THE CHINESE SCENARIO AND THE PAPERS SELECTED IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUE

University-industry collaborations have long been pursued in China, and greatly forged by Chinese government as part of the reform agenda. Such collaborations often occur in China in a triple way, involving universities, enterprises, and research institutes, as there exists a separate research system—as a legacy of the former Soviet model—which is headed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Such collaborations are encouraged and supported initially for the sake of boosting technology transfer and knowledge commercialization. Now with the rise of cooperative education and entrepreneurship education demanded by a knowledge-based economy, university-industry (research institute) collaborations are increasingly viewed as a vehicle to guarantee relevance of education programs in Chinese universities and colleges. In this context, China’s Ministry of Education initiated a pilot project of entrepreneurship education in April 2002 in nine universities including Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Renmin University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Xi’an Jiao Tong University, Wuhan University, and so on. Taking 2002 as a starting point, Chinese universities have been pushing entrepreneurship education steadily, endeavoring to increase students’ professional quality and entrepreneurial ability. However, entrepreneurship education remains a relatively new concept and practice in Chinese universities, and the progress is made not without setbacks. As such, entrepreneurship education is now at a crossroads. On one hand, the Chinese government has launched a campaign of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” and sees it as a new engine fueling China’s economic growth under current downward pressure. Higher education institutions are put on the spot. Without equipping the students with necessary entrepreneurial ability and skills, Chinese universities and colleges could turn their approximately 7 million graduates per year into a burden on the job market—rather than a labor force. On the other hand, due to the short period of offering entrepreneurship education courses that began from a low degree of awareness and consensus, issues and problems concerning curriculum design or teachers training are still prominent. Likewise, cooperative education is now a pressing issue too, as China pledges to transform around 600 local universities into universities of applied sciences. Such a transformation initiative requires close articulation between universities and industry in terms of curriculum development and delivery.

Against this backdrop, we selected and include seven papers in this special issue. Among them, two papers were originally written, and the rest were recently published in Chinese journals. In a specific term, four papers explore university-industry collaborations in China, based on the empirical experiences at international, provincial, and institutional levels. Among them, the original paper, “Promoting University and Industry Links at the Regional Level: Comparing China’s Reform and International Experience,” authored by Yang Po,¹ Yuzhuo Cai, Anu Lyytinen, and Seppo Hölttä, applies the Triple Helix Model to analyzing university-industry relations in universities of applied sciences (UAS), and compares the Finnish experience with the Chinese in light of characteristics in the two countries. As the Finnish UAS system is closely related to the growth of its national and regional innovation system, this paper concludes that the Finnish experience should be absorbed by China. In particular, this paper argues what makes the partnership effective lies in how its activities are institutionalized. Among many other means, regional universities should consider to adopt a more formal structure to create stable long-term cooperation with industries, with or without government financial support. The second paper, “Province/Ministry-Coordinated Industry-University-Institute Cooperation and University Development: Based on the Experiences of Guangdong Province,” authored by Liu Yang and published in 2013 in China’s Journal of Higher Education, also uses the Triple Helix Model as an analytical framework to study industry-university-(research) institute cooperation in the province of Guangdong, and explore how China can readily adopt appropriate methods to form a beneficial three-sided interactive relationship that practically serves the development of the university. This paper shows that the Guangdong experience proves the dynamic triple helix of industry-university-institute partnership is not only a significant link to achieve scientific and technological innovations but also an important means for universities to strengthen academic programs, train innovative talents and even improve their institutional operations. The third paper, “Analysis of the Current State of School-Enterprise Cooperation in Chinese Higher Vocational Education and Influencing Factors,” by Pan Haisheng, Wang Shibin, and Long Deyi and appearing in 2013 in Research in Higher Education of Engineering (China), asserts that strengthening institution-industry collaborations makes the mainstream of development of higher vocational education. As such, the authors conducted an empirical study using survey questionnaires and case studies, and explored the path of institution-industry cooperation in Chinese higher vocational education sector along the “vision-reality” dimension to shed light on the fundamental characteristics of the cooperation, and tracing the logic of “history-reality” to elucidate the causes for difficulties in development of the cooperation. The findings of this study show that institution-industry cooperation in Chinese higher vocational education sector is currently characterized by disparities in the interests of different entities, low quality of cooperation, and inadequate extent of cooperation. Furthermore, this study suggests a path for enhancing the relationship, which comprises industry-oriented operational ideas in the higher vocational institutions, dominant status granted to professional organizations, incentives for industry to participate in vocational education, building productive practicum sites, and encouraging pioneering experiments at local level. The fourth paper, “Empirical Study of the Role of Government Support and Success Factors in Industry-University-Institute Cooperation,” by Guan Zhimin, Cao Zhongpeng, and Tao Jin published in 2015 in Journal of Northeastern University (Social Sciences Edition), presents a quantitative study that surveyed 100 universities/research institutes and 100 enterprises across China, in an effort to discern the factors that impact the outcomes of industry-university-(research) institute cooperation. The findings indicate a mismatch of attention paid to the partnership arrangement among the parties involved in it: enterprises give equal weight to factors such as “ability” and “mechanisms,” while universities/research institutes lean clearly toward “ability.” The analysis further shed light on the fact that universities had paid insufficient attention to establishing cooperative mechanisms, attributing to their rare opportunity to participate in industry-university-institute cooperation in the form of an alliance. As such, the government intervention is crucial, particularly in the form of policy support to enterprises and guideline support to universities/research institutes.

These four papers are followed by an original paper that specifically studies Canada’s accreditation system of co-op education programs and its implications for China’s practice to assure quality of the triple-way (industry-university-institute) cooperative education. Authored by Yang Qiubo, Wang Shibin, and Qiang Zha, this paper is titled “Canada’s Industry-University Co-op Education Accreditation System and its Inspiration for the Evaluation of China’s Industry-University-Institute Cooperative Education,” and reveals that cooperative education in China could be traced back to a 1985 collaborative project between the School of Textile in Shanghai University of Engineering Science and University of Waterloo in Canada aiming at adopting the pattern of “three semesters per year plus work-study alterations” in the School. That was the first trial of its kind under the name of “cooperative education” on Chinese soil. Later in 1988, Shanghai University of Engineering Science was included in Canada-China University Linkage Program and funded to establish cooperative education programs in China alongside University of Waterloo. Since then, cooperative education as a model has not yet blossomed in China. Given China drew on Canadian experience as the archetype of cooperative education, the authors believe Canadian co-op education accreditation system—characterized by its authoritarian status, internationally recognized accreditation standards, and operationable review criteria—should assist China in developing its own evaluation system, which may in turn function to monitor and diagnose problems, inform and regulate development, and provide incentives and guidelines to cooperative education programs in China.

Finally, two papers examine entrepreneurship education in Chinese universities pretty much from an angle of theoretical studies. “Ten Years of Entrepreneurship Education at Chinese Universities: Evolution, Problems and System-Building,” authored by Li Weiming, Li Chunyan, and Du Xiaohua and published in 2013 in the high-profile Chinese journal Educational Research, embeds an analysis of entrepreneurship education in Chinese universities in a historical timeline. It sheds light on that, ever since the Ministry of Education launched the pilot work for entrepreneurship education in April 2002, each Chinese university began exploring entrepreneurship education that would suit China’s actual needs. After a decade of development, entrepreneurship education in Chinese universities has benefitted a fast growing body of students, and also shifted from the early stages of entrepreneurship shows, teacher training, classroom teaching, and imparting of knowledge towards a focus on cultivating entrepreneurial abilities, improving entrepreneurial qualities, and a diversified educational model. In the meantime, Chinese universities still suffer from unsound curriculum design of entrepreneurship education, a lack of qualified teachers for entrepreneurship education, a monotonous model for entrepreneurship education, and inadequate supporting mechanisms for entrepreneurship education. On this basis, the authors suggest a path of pushing forward entrepreneurship education in Chinese universities: to build a scientific curriculum-based educational system, establish a perfected entrepreneurial practicum system, build up a system for an outstanding corps of qualified teachers, construct a perfected educational model system, and perfect the evaluation system for entrepreneurship education. The other paper, “Status Quo and Outlook of the Studies of Entrepreneurship Education in China. Statistics and Analysis Based on Papers Indexed in CSSCI (2004–2013),” authored by Tian Xia, Zhang Shumin, and Wu Yifeng, and published in 2014 in Heilongjiang Higher Education Studies, applies a bibliometric analysis to findings about entrepreneurship education from the papers indexed in CSSCI (Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index) between 2004 and 2013. In this duration, Chinese entrepreneurship education experienced an exploratory phase (2004–2007) drawing on foreign models, a development phase (2008–2010) focusing on employment problems, and a transformative phase (2011–present) centering on cultivation of student entrepreneurial abilities, while featuring such primary characteristics as “multidisciplinary fusion,” “imbalanced regional distribution,” and “policy orientation.” This paper concludes with a visible rise in terms of quantity and quality of entrepreneurship education research, and, based on a bibliometric and a knowledge map analysis, anticipates that studies of Chinese entrepreneurship education are to center on three primary areas of “entrepreneurship education and talent cultivation,” “entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial environments,” and “entrepreneurship education and innovation education.”

Altogether, the selected papers provide the cutting-edge discussions with respect to university-industry partnership, cooperative education and entrepreneurship education in China. They also showcase the current directions and trends of research on such topics. Those who are interested in these topics may use these papers (as well as their reference lists) as a clue and track down even more relevant literature in the field. Last but not least, we would like to thank Zhang A’bei, a doctoral student at the School of Education, Tianjin University, for her assistance in searching the Chinese papers in an enormous pool of literature.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Qiang Zha

Qiang Zha is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education, York University, Canada, and an adjunct professor in the School of Education, Tianjin University, China.

Yan Guangfen

Yan Guangfen is the dean and a professor in the School of Education, Tianjin University, China.

Li Zhong

Li Zhong is the department chair and professor in the School of Education, Tianjin University, China.

Notes

Chinese authors in mainland China remain named in the Chinese order, with their surname going first and given name coming after; Chinese authors in the West have their names shown in the English order.