Partnering with practice: How partnerships can be developed, shared and managed

Abstract

Partnerships between business schools and practice are an area of underused potential. In their recent report, the AACSB (2012) recognizes the need for a stronger connection between education and practice and stresses that schools need to articulate the impacts of their investments in scholarship on students’ educational experiences and on the broader communities they serve. In this paper, we discuss our partnering experience that we undertook to integrate an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system into our curriculum. ERP systems pose a significant technical challenge due to their complexity. We discuss the importance of developing a partnership with practice and how such a partnership offers a solution to our problem of working with a complex system in our courses. We detail a partnership with a consulting company with significant experience with ERP systems and a commitment to education. We outline how a practice partner can collaborate with faculty to enhance students’ educational experience. Developing good working partnerships between practice and academe, if done effectively, can provide an opportunity to bring educational value to a new height.