Building bridges: The role of authenticity in academic education

Universities educate students in various disciplines, so as to go to work in society with an academic frame of mind. However, only a fraction of students pursue an academic career; the majority end up in business, government or the non-profit sector. These non-academic worlds, also known as business systems, are fundamentally different economic organisations. Although academia is typically non-vocational, we want to properly prepare students for the job-market by bridging the gap between the world of science and the world of business, while realising that each of these worlds has its own logic. The overarching logic of the world of science is to contribute to our collective body of knowledge, while the overarching logic of the world of business is to make money. Many bridges have been suggested and built; in this article, we build a bridge from an educational perspective.