Smart specialization in many regions of European Union is not functioning due to the lack of innovation capacity and disconnection between the actors on local and transnational level. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) shall become seedbeds for innovation by understanding the market needs and providing innovation knowledge, business contacts and support for students, who will later implement RIS3 as entrepreneurs, employees or decision makers. HEIs are unable to meet these requirements and are not sharing best practices of knowledge & technology transfer. This challenge is particularly present in the area of public health, medicine and life sciences, where several key enabling technologies emerge, such as biotechnology, nanomedicine, e-Health, biomaterials, 3D printing, big data. The objective of NetHIIP is to connect members of the innovation system to enable them to interact and strengthen their innovation capacity. The consortium will develop a transnational and digital incubation process that allows innovation to emerge by a bottom up process at HEIs in interaction with RIS3 actors. Through IIProgramme&IIPlatform developed in the project HEIs will be able to modernize their teaching techniques with digital solutions and will have higher impact on the professional life of the students. Beside their teaching skills and abilities, their knowledge and competence becomes more marketable by expanding their professional opportunities and also by providing new impulses to their research activities. To achieve continuous market validation of the innovative ideas of students, market actors will be involved as mentors, judges, guest speakers. All incubation activities will be channelled through an online ‘incubation platform’ allowing continuous interaction among the students and regional innovation actors, creating transnational transparency of capacities, and boosting transnational co-creation, co-learning and validation. Partners with different levels of knowledge will strengthen their competences, reduce their disparities and promote the cooperation of RIS3 actors in the CE area. Strong links will be created to local/national/EU public administrations by the state-owned HEIs and by the ASPs, such as EIT Health. The pilots wll support students boosting their innovation capacities, validating their ideas by market and public actors, which will make the quadruple helix and smart specialization work. Overall, the expected impact of NetHIIP is to enhance the open innovation space of the EU, enhance the high growth potential of SMEs, facilitate the interaction, co-learning, co-creation between different actors of the socio-economic environment, and enable HEIs to achieve their third mission, while the establishment of the entrepreneurial ecosystem is also a vital outcome for the modernisation of higher education agenda of the EU. This way, all the involved stakeholders will benefit from a well developed/ established ecosystem that will enable mutual growth.
The core aim of the project was to create an educational program, which uses state of the art, modern pedagogical methodology to develop the entrepreneurial skillset of university students in an international, interdisciplinary context. Also we strived to design a technological infrastructure that allows the members of the local business ecosystem of the partner institutions to take part in the development of the entrepreneurial projects of the international, multidisciplinary student teams. Beside the ICT framework and the pedagogical methodology, the consortium made effort to synchronize the diverging curriculum of the partner institutions. Each partner, from different countries followed a different scheduling of the curriculum, which made it hard to develop an educational program, which allows students to take part in the program in a synchronized manner. After studying and assessing the curriculum design and the specificity of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem at all partners a “hackathon” type methodology was implemented, which enables learners to have a very intensive, high impact learning experience, which can be integrated into all curriculums irrespective of the disciplinary background. (extended version attached)
The Faculty of Business and Economics at the UP has been focusing on developing the entrepreneurial capacity of university students for the past one and a half decade. The goal of the project was to create a learning program that has the capability of being integrated into the regular curriculum of all participating institutions either as a stand-alone course or as part of a course which also related to entrepreneurial skill development. Based on needs analysis students of CE HEIs in health sector miss these necessary competences. Innovative thinking and business knowledge is not satisfactory in this field. Project focus on the development of the transferable skill of students. The educational programs have to include the members of the local business ecosystems in an active mode. Companies, NGOs and governmental organizations need to have direct contact with the student body of the institutions in order for the students to have a firsthand information on the functioning of the economic environment of the institution. The connectivity of the students and the local economic actors also expands the opportunities of these stakeholders in terms of employability in the local economy, which eliminates the problem of brain drain.