Industry-academic partnerships for successful capstone projects

Current engineering curriculums have evolved over the past several years to address multiple concerns raised by industry. Their concerns include interdisciplinary engineering teams, teambuilding, project management, and others directly related to successful engineering careers. In order to better prepare future engineers, universities have implemented a variety of capstone courses to address industry concerns, as well as ABET EC2000 criteria. Capstone courses range in content from teams of students in the same discipline, working on the same or different projects, to industry-sponsored design projects primarily focused on producing paper designs. In very few instances schools require student teams to physically produce their designs. This paper discusses implementation and coordination of the projects, benefits of using industry-academic partnerships for capstone design courses, how the course effectively meets and exceeds industry and ABET concerns, additional benefits for the engineering school and the community. In addition, examples of several projects are presented.