AN ASSESSMENT OF THE CONSTRAINTS TO UNIVERSITY - INDUSTRY COLLABORATION (UIC) INNIGERIAN CONSTRUCTION SECTOR

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Department of Environmental Design

ABSTRACT
This research work is on University-Industry research Collaborations in Nigeria. It focused on three objectives which are to establish the status of these collaboration in Nigeria, to evaluate the collaboration needs of the parties, and to assess the barriers to the collaboration. To achieve these, mixed research methods; quantitative and qualitative approaches were applied concurrently to collect data from a sample drawn from construction firms in fourfast developing cities in Nigeria and three top ranking universities in Nigeria according to NUC. The study discoveredbased on the response of the interviewees, that UIC in Nigeria is not only low in adoption but also in awareness as 75% of them attested to this fact. Solving specific technical or design problems and improving production process/product quality constitute the main reasons why the industry prefer to collaborate with university with RII = 0.80 and 0.76 respectively. While on the other hand, the university would rather collaborate with industry primarily to gain knowledge about practical problems useful for teaching and to test the practical application of one‘s own research/theory each with RII = 0.78 and 0.76 respectively. The potential areas of collaboration for both the university and industry includes areas concerning dealing with technical and practical problems, Knowledge transfer, and innovations.The high impact barrier to the collaboration according to the practitioners include inadequate resources having RII of 0.81. While Poor Leadership/Top management commitment and support towards partnership is the top ranked barrier to UIC with RII = 0.80. Construction practitioners and academics seeks collaboration for different interest, but, they tend towards common themes. Government should make UIC promoting policies that mitigates the barriers.