The paper discusses corporate universities and their characteristics. It's emphasized a double criterion of differentiation between corporate universities and training and development departments, looking forward to propose a definition for corporate universities based on this distinction. The study is characterized as an exploratory one once the knowledge about corporate universities is incipient. The definition proposed for corporate universities is based on three concomitants characteristics: development of core competencies to the business, non restriction of educational services to employees, and establishment of partnerships with higher education institutions or degree granting independently.
corporate universities; training and development departments; organizational learning