New collaboration agreement with Volvo Car Group
A new collaboration agreement with Volvo Car Group was signed last week, with the ambition to act together for a sustainable future. The agreement aims to create mutual benefit and value by contributing to strengthened competitiveness for Volvo Car Group and strengthened quality and relevance in the School's research and education.
The School of Business, Economics and Law and Volvo Car Group (VCG) have a long history of collaboration, since 1999 within the framework of the School’s Partnership Programme. The main focus of the collaboration within the Partnership Programme is competence development and activities related to recruitment and employer branding. The new agreement focuses on how VCG and the School will act together to contribute to a sustainable future.
“We enter into this agreement to highlight and strengthen the importance of research collaborations and to facilitate joint research applications, but also to broaden and deepen the collaboration on the content of our programmes and courses. The agreement complements and builds on, but does not replace, our well-established collaboration for research-related knowledge transfer and labour market matching for students”, says the School's Dean Per Cramér.
Mutual benefit
For VCG, the collaboration means strengthened competitiveness through an in-depth understanding of the consequences of digitalisation and electrification for their business model and its development, and for how they can both contribute to and benefit from a sustainable societal transformation.
For the School, the collaboration means an opportunity to strengthen the relevance of research by using theories and methods to create new knowledge that is applicable and can contribute to the development of a sustainable society.
Initially, the focus is on identifying research areas that are of interest to both the School and VCG, and initiating research collaborations. In the next phase, joint research applications are formulated. The research results will be published according to the same principles as other research, but with more opportunities to be applied in practice and to contribute to VCG's innovative power.
“Through more and in-depth relationships in research, we get to know each other, and can see more opportunities to collaborate. We can strengthen relevance and quality in the School's activities, for example by VCG participating in various forms of advisory bodies at research centres and in educational programmes”, says Per Cramér.
”In the engineering arena, we have worked with our leading technical universities for a long time, utilising their spearhead knowledge and scientific research to improve our products. This is a very good opportunity for us to start doing the same on the business side of things”, says Kristian Abel, Vice President and Head of Complete Vehicle Engineering at VCG.
Opportunities for students
The education at the School is research-based and the knowledge generated in the joint research projects will be used in the teaching. The relationships between the School's researchers and various employees within VCG will also provide more, and more multifaceted, opportunities for students to write essays, take part in guest lectures and work with cases in the programmes. This will strengthen the students' conditions for personal and professional development.
