The Alumni Advantage — Why IKA BINUS Is Your Fastest Path to an Industry Partner

Source: https://www.getcourse.co.nz/blogs/how-to-become-a-social-worker| Licensed by CC BY-NC 4.0

BINUS University has over 200,000 alumni. They work at Bank Mandiri, Tokopedia, Gojek, Astra International, Telkom Indonesia, and hundreds of other companies across every sector of the Indonesian economy. Many of them sit in roles where they have budget authority, technical decision-making power, or direct influence over their company’s R&D and vendor partnerships. And a meaningful proportion of them still remember — with some degree of warmth — a lecturer who shaped how they think about their field. This is not a sentimental observation. It is the single most important structural asset BINUS has for industry research collaboration, and the 2025 ISM data confirms it: alumni connections are the strongest identified driver of industry participation in the entire ISM program.

This is worth sitting with if you are a BINUS lecturer who has been approaching industry through formal channels — website inquiries, cold email, event attendance — and finding it slow. Cold outreach to a company’s corporate communication or CSR department produces very different results than a conversation that starts with “I taught Andi when he was doing his final project on supply chain optimization — he mentioned you have a challenge in that area.” The former positions you as an external vendor. The latter positions you as someone already inside the circle of trust. Indonesian business culture, with its deep emphasis on relational connection and known intermediaries, makes this difference more pronounced, not less.

The IKA BINUS network — the alumni association — is the mechanism for activating this at scale. But most lecturers treat it as a passive resource: an alumni show up to career fairs or guest lecture invitations, and the relationship stays in that lane. What the ISM program reveals is that the network’s real value is in the reverse direction — lecturers who actively cultivate alumni relationships as potential research partners, not just as former students, are the ones generating the strongest industry engagement results.

There is a model for how this can work. Universitas Indonesia’s (UI) technology transfer and industry liaison office has documented that its most productive industry partnerships in the 2020–2023 period were consistently initiated not through formal MoU channels but through alumni-mediated introductions — often a single alumni contact in a company’s R&D or operations team who agreed to champion an internal proposal for collaboration (UI Direktorat Inovasi dan Science Techno Park, 2023 — Annual Collaboration Report). The formal structure followed the relationship. The relationship came first.

For a BINUS lecturer, building that relationship intentionally means a few specific things. It starts with knowing who your former students are and what they are doing now — not in a way that requires you to track hundreds of people, but in a way that keeps you present and visible to the people most likely to care about your research direction. Publishing accessible, non-technical summaries of your current research on BRIDGE Apps, LinkedIn, or through BINUS RTT’s communication channels is one way to stay on the radar of alumni who may not follow journals but do check what their former lecturers are working on. Attending IKA BINUS events, not just as a faculty representative but as a researcher actively interested in industry problems, signals a different kind of engagement than most lecturers project.

When a warm connection exists, the first conversation with a potential industry partner does not need to be a pitch. It can be a question: “What problems are you running into in your work right now?” If the answer overlaps with your research area — and you may be surprised how often it does — you have the beginning of an RfP. At that point, BINUS RTT can help structure what comes next: an ISM Day invitation to the contact, an RfP submission through BRIDGE, or a direct introduction to the partnership team to formalize the collaboration framework.

The 2026 ISM strategy has explicitly identified IKA BINUS engagement as a priority to be scaled. RTT is building the structures; what the program needs from individual lecturers is the activation of their own alumni network with deliberate research intent. The fastest path to your first or next industry partner is almost certainly someone who already knows you. For a full overview of how BINUS connects researchers and industry, visit the Industry Partnership & Solution Matching page on BINUS RTT.

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