The cooperation between firms and academia is often seen as an effective way to provide disciplinary skills and knowledge of system building for inexperienced students. In theory, cooperation has many advantages: The students get first-hand knowledge of the industrial environment and experiences of working with professional designers. In this way they get an opportunity to feel the pace of realistic projects as well as an opportunity to show their skills for future employment. Not only the students benefit from this cooperation; the firms gain new innovative ideas and knowledge of the latest development techniques. They also get good leverage on the resources invested since the amount of hours spent by the student teams could be tenfold the contribution of the firms.
In real life, the cooperation between firms and academia can be both time-consuming as well as troublesome. One reason for this is that their objectives are different: The teachers want the students to learn and the companies want to make money. To overcome unnecessary barriers in cooperative design projects, a set of guidelines have been created at the School of Engineering at Jönköping University in Sweden. The guidelines have been developed from the experiences of collaborating with more than 30 different companies between the years 2000 to 2006. One finding is the importance of aligning the expected project outcome between students, teachers and companies. Another important aspect is to ensure that the standard of the work is high enough in order to satisfy the firms. This is achieved by a careful selection of projects and by comprehensive coaching of the students using a proven framework for learning design.