The purpose of this paper is to describe an educational partnership experience between rural retailers and graduate students in a Merchandising, Apparel and Textiles program. Students were afforded an opportunity to work with small business owners in rural communities, giving them real world exposure to the actual challenges being faced by…

The importance of knowledge to the effective development of economic growth in the twenty-first century has led to a number of initiatives such as lifelong learning, skills development and knowledge transfer. Of these, knowledge transfer has predominantly been concerned with the commercial exploitation of research knowledge. This article suggests…