The second instalment of a multimillion-rand project to bridge the knowledge gap between industry and academia with regard to information and communication technology (ICT) was launched as part of an ICT programme last month.

The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU), the University of Oldenburg (UOL), in Germany, and the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, launched the Developing and Strengthening Industry-Driven Knowledge Transfer between Developing Countries (Dasik) project last year to develop and conduct intensive training in current ICT-related research fields.

The aim of the project is to facilitate the transfer of knowledge among members of the participating partner institutions. The programme, which will run to November 2014, is industry-focused, compared with traditional higher education- focused programmes.

“Dasik has been made possible owing to €220 000 in funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (Daad), an agency that supports international academic cooperation,” states NMMU project coordinator Dr Brenda Scholtz.

Daad South Africa director Dr Ralph Hermann states that the projects funded by the orga- nisation are aimed at fostering better ties between universities in close proximity.

“In Dasik’s case, NMMU and the University of Dar es Salaam have collaborated closely with mutual benefit. ICT is simply a topic you can’t avoid nowadays,” he says.

Daad focuses on raising skills and is the world’s largest facilitator of higher-education exchange and collaboration. It is a developmental approach to research and also creates sustainable relationships between German and international universities, Hermann notes.

Scholtz states that, at the Dasik launch, in Port Elizabeth, last year, all partners agreed on a concrete catalogue of practice- orientated topics related to business process management (BPM), environmental management information systems, mobile computing, enterprise resource planning systems as well as business intelligence.

She adds that, since the programme’s launch, each one of these fields has been covered in a specific Dasik module.

“Each module involves a one-week training course conducted by UOL and NMMU and all five Dasik modules are presented at NMMU,” she says.

A total of 25 delegates, comprising honours degree students, professors from the three universities, as well as global industries, including multinational technology and consulting corporation IBM, German automobile manufacturer Volkswagen and software developer Syspro, attended the inaugural course at the beginning of this year, which focused on BPM.

“The Dasik project is important for the transfer of knowledge between business and academia. At universities, students somehow miss the real-world application of their studies, but with this programme, all that changes,” says UOL Computer Sciences Department head Daniel Meyerholt.

University of Dar es Salaam’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering lecturer, Dr Godfrey Justo, says the synergy created between the perspectives of industry and academia is a new and much-needed direction in university training.

“Two other staff members from Dar es Salaam joined me [at the inaugural course]. We are lagging behind in engaging with industry and this helps us overcome that. We have a shared goal to train our students better and to have industry learn from any new research at universities,” he says.

Scholtz says the concept for Dasik came about three years ago when she and UOL Business Information Systems chair Pro- fessor Jorge Gómez first met.

“We discovered that there was a lot of synergy between our universities. Professor Gómez was working on a broader project at NMMU and we discovered that, at computer science level, we had many overlapping interests,” she says.

Syspro support executive David van Rensburg notes that business has hailed the move towards a greater collaboration between academia and industry.