What are the right kind of problems to solve in a university/industry collaboration?

University/industry collaboration is sometimes seen as a mere training ground for the students. The setup is like this: The industry supply real life tasks, which the students then take on and deliver solutions to. This is of course beneficiary to the students – they train on real life tasks – and the industry partner gets a task done. Nothing wrong with that.
But at Lillebaelt University of Applied Science (EAL) in Odense, Denmark we aim to take this further. We do this by adding the element of innovation to the mix. So the industry partner isn’t supplying set tasks for the students, but giving them problems to solve to which the industry partner does not have a solution. They are problem areas that is at the fringe of the industry partner’s own wish for development.