Synergistic use of private and governmental resources in Science, Technology and Innovation to leverage industrial development: a proven model of success with 10 years of excellent learning experiences.

Abstract

This document describes how a group of researchers concerned about financing high impact graduate level engineering projects and attract top talents to work in solving them, founded in 2008 the “Industrial Consortium to Foster Applied Research and Enhance Regional Economic Growth in México”. This program, after running for ten years, was able to graduate 85 Masters and 5 PhDs students who worked in projects provided by twelve industrial companies and were mentored by faculty and leading industrial engineers. Most of these new graduate are now happily working, in Mexico, at the companies that supported their research projects. To make this program sustainable for the school of engineering, the companies were requested to financially support the program. At the end of the first 10th years of running the program the amount of money received from the industrial sector, and eventually from the Mexican Government, was in the order of five million dollars. With this financial support the program was able to convene top Mexican talents, independently of their own economic resources, to pursue graduate studies and provide innovative solutions to the specific engineering projects proposed by the industrial sector. Furthermore, a good percentage of these graduate students were able to publish their research work in international journals and conferences. The program also proved to be an excellent tool for talent retention, enhance industrial research and foster high tech continuous education at the participant industrial companies. With the aim to help other researchers to replicate this experience, this document present the main steps and barriers encountered during the first ten years of experience of this program and leaves opened several aspects that can be improved in any future replication.