Structuring an advanced technology degree program in a developing country

Technology consists of the implementation of scientific principles into tools that allows us to solve problems. As new technology emerges, the capacity to solve harder problems increase. A developing country can choose either to buy technology or develop its own. The latter has the advantage of creating an in-house understanding of both the scientific principles and the creation of new technology process. Nevertheless, it may turn to be a long cycle where the more likely outcome could be a brittle reverse engineered copy of the desired technology. In this document, we present a proposal to structure an academic degree program that may help to create the technology needed to solve problems in industry. In this program, the students courses and thesis work, is related to a problem in industry. Indeed, the curricula are defined both in terms of the student background and a problem in industry. This approach has the advantage of shortening the time between technology conception and application. Under this framework, an industry taking part in the program works with an academic institution in the solution of its specific problems; the academic institution counts with the industry as added research facilities; and researchers have students to work with, ample budget to do their investigations and the possibility to do a great impact with their results. The problems that surge with our approach include how to match existing expertise in academy and the needs in industry, and the inadequacy of the academic periods with the tight time-schedule generally present in industry.