Innováció és versenyképesség. Járműipari hálózati együttműködés a hazai felsőoktatásban

Abstract

In the past few decades creativity, innovation activities and the knowledge accumulated by human capital have become more significant within the operation of the corporations therefore, in order to preserve their competitiveness, companies have started to establish business cooperation agreements both with mar-ket and non-market participants. The main goal of such collaboration of innovative nature is to gain the lacking corporate information and get knowledge generated by professionals working outside the company. One of such collaborative forums is the economic-educational relation system aiming not only the preservation and improve-ment of corporate competiveness but the effective operation of universities with high quality educational and research programs. Business success highly depends on competitiveness, which can be achieved by innovation. Innovation activities lay upon the skills of being able to renew and re-structure through the adequate use of knowledge. Future employees can acquire that knowledge produced by the technological development in a school-based education system then would be able to make profit out of it for the company as becoming part of the human capital. Business practice has been searching for solutions to which through the innovation chain the knowledge-producing organizations can be reactive resulting in further educational demands. In the 21st century contributing with 10% to the GDP Hungarian automotive in-dustry has been considered one of the key strategic industries. Due to the technologi-cal development complex procedures and systems appeared within the industry and because of the fast industrial production the lifecycle of the product has shortened which led to enhanced market competition. This procedure was even intensified by the economic crisis in 2008. There is an urging need for effective and competitive operation synergy based on integrated networking by all market participants. By supporting the above mentioned idea „Cooperation Agreement on the Higher Education and Research in the Automotive Industry” was established containing long-term collaborative plans of eight Hungarian universities and industrial players. The aim of the agreement is to harmonize the signers’ activity in the field of engineer training, educational development and automotive research by cooperation and labour division. Besides this, agreement covers other key areas such as the training of inter-nationally competitive professionals with adequate theoretical and practical knowledge, the establishment of innovative and competitive companies with prominent R&D activity and the operation of recognized universities perfectly reflective to market demands. Main parts of the collaborate program include the harmonisation of the theoretical and practical training and a quality-based education system, in which the number of stu-dents is appointed in line with market demands namely, instead of the so-called „mass-training-system” talent care programs are in favour. From an industrial view-point, through financial subsidies and level of regulations state support should also play a key role.