Today universities and higher education face challenges related to collaboration with the society. Societal impacts and innovation from academia are highly valued from governments and interaction with and impacts on society and practice are of crucial importance for universities today (Gellerstedt, et al. 2018; Galan, 2018). University West in Sweden has a profile area in work-integrated learning (WIL), which generally aims to address issues on integrating theory and practice in education in a sustainable and coherent way (Olsson et al. 2019; Gellerstedt et. al. 2015). In this paper the arguments are based on a study of a PhD-education (3rd cycle) in Informatics with the specialization of work-integrated learning. at University West.

The focus is on the collaboration between the university and industry through industrial PhD-students who are active in the university-industry interface i.e. fully employed by the industry during their PhD-education.Research on collaboration between PhD- students and industry is, according to Thune scarce. Previous research mainly focuses on the students´ learning outcomes and educational experiences (Thune, 2009) although some benefits of this kind of collaboration are recognized (Assbring and Nuur, 2017). Thus, research on interaction and informing flows between university, students, research and practice needs to be further developed ( Bernhard et al, 2018).

In a recent study aiming at evaluating a PhD education (third-cycle) and research environment from a WIL perspective several collaboration activities were identified at key stakeholders in university as well as in the industry (Bernhard et al 2018) by adopting an informing science model in order to conduct a current state analysis. The findings implicate e.g. that flows from PhD-student and research environment towards stakeholders were generally strong, while the opposite flows were weaker. This was especially crucial for the flows originating in practice.Thus, the overall aim of this paper is to explore university-industry collaboration and identify possible aspects of societal impact of industrial PhD-student education. The research is conducted as a case study and qualitative methods will be applied.