University–Industry Collaboration (UIC) has been identified as an essential item on Malaysia’s agenda for transforming itself into knowledge and innovation-based economy. However, despite the efforts, most initiatives have had limited results. This paper reports on an explorative study that sought to understand the contemporary realities of UIC in the Malaysian context. In particular, the study identified the expectations and impediments to UIC, from the perspectives of three groups of stakeholders – the academics, the industry players and policymakers. The findings reveal a number of barriers, including cultural differences, perceived lack of academic expertise and reputation, an inadequacy of institutional policies and regulations, lack of trust, issues of intellectual property rights, and the lack of an appropriate reward system. This paper concludes by proposing policy recommendations and strategies that could be used by the government, university, and the industry to promote further and foster university-industry collaborative opportunities and initiatives. (148 words)

The future of Malaysia as a high-income and competitive nation largely depends on its pool of highly skilled human capital. Hence, the issue of human capital development has taken centre stage in numerous reform agendas of Malaysia. This paper seeks to provide examples of policy initiatives aimed at facilitating the management of highly educated talent in Malaysia. It subsequently considers the role of higher education institutions, particularly the universities, as attractors, educators and retainers of intellectuals, in shaping talent. In conclusion, we argue that more significant underlying shortcomings of talent development are derived from the still transitional nature of the reforms and incomplete structural changes occurring in the national system, and that a change in mindset is the first necessary step towards nurturing and developing a human resource talent pool.

Leadership has been considered as an essential foundation for universities to flourish, more so in the context of emerging higher education systems. Using an exploratory qualitative approach, this paper reviews the challenges and prospects in the development of higher education leaders in selected countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). While variations were reported by the respondents, the challenges were somewhat similar: lack of leadership development policy and training centres, the non-availability and questionable quality of programmes, the irrelevance of western and corporate leadership theories, and the lack of systematic talent management programmes. For the lower income countries’ respondents, contextual issues seemed to affect leadership development. Since there seems to be inadequate leadership development systems in most ASEAN countries, we propose a synergistic approach among stakeholders with tracked records in intra- and inter-regional level capacity building to design and monitor programme implementation.