Icam (Institut Catholique d'Arts et Metiers) [1] was founded in 1898 in Lille. Today eight campuses offer engineering training in France and abroad: Lille, Nantes, Toulouse, La Roche-sur-Yon, Vannes, Pointe Noire / Douala (Central Africa) and Loyola Icam College of Engineering and Technology, in Chennai city, (capital of Tamil Nadu state, South India). Icam remains true to its Jesuit legacy, and strives to educate each student to become a person able to take responsibilities in the real world. With over 3000 students, Icam is a well-known engineering "grande-ecole" in France. Icam's pedagogy consists of a blend of theory and practice, and is based on an important collaboration with industry. After three years of basic courses in every engineering fields (Mechanical Engineering, Fluid Mechanics, Materials Engineering, Design and Manufacturing Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Sciences), the fourth year allows students to choose courses in the following areas : agrifood, construction and public works, transportation, energy, information and communication technologies. All these courses are taught by industry professionals, giving the students an accurate vision of their future jobs. The fifth year of training focuses on a one-semester internship (as an engineer), and a one-semester project, based on Research and Development activities, realised in collaboration with industry (over 1000 projects during the past five years); R&D projects are carried out by teams of 2 students working full time for one semester, and supervised by an Icam research fellow/lecturer (30 ECTS credits). All R&D projects are performed subcontracted by companies (from small and medium businesses to large companies), helping students to have a better understanding of industrial organisation and applications. This also helps each department to develop strong links with local industry. These collaborations "school -industry" offer several advantages from an educational point of view: student motivation, project management suited to customer expectations (deadlines, methodology), financial issues taken into account, hands-on approach (development of new materials, product and process design, process improvements, quality procedures.), etc. Projects examples: - LE RELAIS: development, characterisation, optimisation, and industrialisation of a new insulation material based on recycled textiles. -STAUB: support for environmental compliance of a foundry. -TOLES PERFOREES DE LA SAMBRE: development of an evanescent oil cleaning system based on luminous flux for perforated steel sheets. -RAILTECH: process modeling of rails aluminothermic welding.