Under the conditions of Industry 4.0, much attention is beginning to be paid to such trends of the modern economy development as competitiveness, innovation, labor productivity, knowledge economy, and the digital economy. The purpose of the study is to analyze and propose the most effective mechanisms of interaction between higher education institutions and companies that would allow achieving a synergistic effect. The scientific novelty of this study consists in examining the essence of economic processes currently operating in the world economy through the prism of the features of higher education, and in developing a number of recommendations, including on building intellectual capital and building close ties between education and business that would allow on the one hand, to increase the competitiveness of enterprises, and on the other, the competitiveness of higher education institutions in the world market. The paper presents the following research methods -systemic method, statistical method, graphical method, analogy method.