Using PD6 to Explore the Initial Collaboration between Chinese Companies and Chinese Universities-Experiments Done by Sino-Finnish Centre, Tongji University
DS 81: Proceedings of NordDesign 2014, Espoo, Finland 27-29th August 2014
Year: 2014
Editor: Miko Laakso, Kalevi Ekman
Author: Fan, Fei; Lu, Zhou; Wang, Danni; Zhou, Wenjia
Series: NordDESIGN
Institution: Tongji University, China
Section: Collaboration, communication and co-creation in design and development
Page(s): 164-172
ISBN: 978-1-904670-58-2
Abstract
In the hierarchical but decentralized organization of Chinese universities, individual schools in universities manage the relations between the university and the industry (U-I) independently through the collaborative projects. This paper presents four major challenges via in-depth interviews with school staff in one Chinese university, i.e. having difficult to initiate the U-I communication, being oblivious of recognizing students as stakeholders, being lack of professional personnel or skill training, and being reluctant to take a proactive role. To address the problems, this paper introduces Product Development in 6 hours (PD6) as a method to explore the U-I initial collaboration. An experimental case is presented to gain the feedback from companies, students, and organizers so as to analyse the implications of applying PD6 in Chinese context.
Keywords: University-industry collaboration, PD6, semi-structured questionnaire