����Vlog

When universities talk about preparing students for the future, we often focus on expertise. We discuss technical competency, disciplinary rigour and specialised knowledge. Those things remain essential. But after many years working across design, education and industry partnerships, I have become convinced that one of the most important skills universities must now teach is collaboration.

That is not collaboration as a slogan or an aspiration but as a deliberate educational practice.

The world’s biggest challenges – and opportunities – don’t fit neatly inside disciplines. Climate resilience, artificial intelligence, public health, cybersecurity and sustainable development all involve technical systems, human behaviour, ethics, social-cultural discourse, policy and design simultaneously. When I have visited firms as an educator and administrator over the past few years, people often ask me if we prepare students for collaborative work, because that is how they work.  

Why collaboration sometimes fails

Yet universities around the world still reward individual achievement more often than collaborative problem-solving. We tell students interdisciplinary work matters while often making it difficult to pursue. As higher education leaders, we need to acknowledge this contradiction. In my experience, interdisciplinary collaboration does not fail because people oppose it philosophically – most faculty and students recognise its value. The challenge is that collaboration is difficult, messy and time-consuming, especially when institutions are not designed to support it.

• Spotlight guide: How to advance collaboration across higher education
• ‘Success in academia needs a metric for how scholarship improves lives’
• To get started with interdisciplinarity, ask: what’s the problem?

I have seen this firsthand in interdisciplinary studios and collaborative projects involving designers, engineers, business students and researchers. Students frequently enter these environments with very different assumptions and paradigms about how problems should be approached. Designers may prioritise exploration and imagination. Engineers may focus on feasibility and implementation. Business students may optimise for efficiency and scalability.

At first, these differences can create frustration. But this is exactly where universities have an opportunity. We should help students learn how to navigate those tensions productively. The goal is not to erase disciplinary identities; it is to teach students how to respect expertise outside their own.

I recall working as a department head and having to close an interdisciplinary course that included faculty and students from three colleges because of disagreements among participants. The concept of the course was brilliant, but without genuine appreciation and respect for one another, collaboration is unattainable. 

Teaching students – and faculty – to collaborate

That requires institutions to move beyond simply placing students and faculty from different backgrounds into the same room and hoping collaboration emerges naturally. It rarely does.

Collaboration itself can – and should – be taught. That means helping students learn how to listen actively, manage conflict, communicate across disciplines and develop shared ownership over problems. These are also essential leadership capabilities.

Faculty development matters just as much. Many junior faculty members already understand the importance of interdisciplinary work, particularly in emerging areas connected to AI, sustainability and social innovation. But universities often continue rewarding faculty primarily through disciplinary metrics. If institutions genuinely want collaborative innovation, leaders must think carefully about how promotion structures, funding models and teaching expectations encourage (or discourage) it.

Practical barriers deserve attention. Course schedules, curriculum requirements, assessment systems and accreditation structures can make interdisciplinary work harder than it needs to be. Universities should regularly ask themselves a simple question: are our systems reinforcing or preventing collaboration?

The importance of industry partnerships

Industry partnerships can also help universities rethink collaboration more effectively. Students benefit enormously from seeing how real-world problem-solving unfolds. They learn that innovation involves iteration, respectful disagreement, negotiation and collective creativity. They also begin to understand that no discipline owns innovation alone.

In my own field of industrial design, I learned this lesson early in my career. At first, I believed my role as a designer was to generate ideas while others implemented them. Over time, I realised that true collaboration begins when everyone becomes a creative contributor to defining the problem itself. That shift changed how I think about leadership and education. One of the most important questions is: “Who is missing at the table?”

This is especially important in the age of AI. It is already transforming how we process information, generate ideas, conduct research and solve technical problems. But as these tools become more powerful, universities must place even greater emphasis on the distinctly human ability to work across perspectives and solve complex problems collectively.

Universities should not simply produce graduates who excel individually within narrow specialties. We should prepare people capable of solving complex problems together. That requires intentional institutional design. It requires leadership willing to prioritise collaboration not only rhetorically but structurally – and willing to take risks and make bold decisions. 

And it requires educators willing to teach students that some of the most important breakthroughs emerge not from isolated expertise but from the intersection of different perspectives.

Lu Liu is dean of the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design and professor of industrial design at Virginia Tech. He was inducted into the Academy of Fellows of the Industrial Designers Society of America in 2025 in recognition of his distinguished contributions to design education and leadership.

If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, .