The Fourth Industrial revolution brings wide automatization in various fields, so people with low skills become less competitive in the labour market (The EP resolution on creating a competitive EU labour market for the 21st century, 2015). Entrepreneurship, intercultural competence, collaboration, complex problem solving, sustainability and social innovation becomes necessary characteristic for young person prosperous life. There is strong evidence that graduates are more likely to participate in innovation processes if their studies involve working with practical knowledge and authentic problems (Educating HE Students for Innovative Economies, 2013). Use of appropriate teaching techniques might help to solve these challenges. According to that, the goal of the project is to encourage students to acquire needed competences through participating in internationalised internships programme (working with a group of students from different countries via web-based applications), which would involve solving real-life problems in order to create societal value through implementing social innovations (ambition is to spin-off those proposals as new projects, programmes, organisations or companies in partner countries). For this several tasks needs to be done: prepare internationalized internship methodology, social innovation implementation framework and run two rounds of internationalised internships: first (pilot) for evaluating produced results qualitatively in order to improve them and the second one to evaluate and improve scalability of project results. All partners will be involved in every activity to some extent because consortium has chosen iterative IO creation process. Every intellectual output will have a core team working with the product and leading organization from that team, other partners will have ‘friendly critic’ role. There will be 2 intellectual outputs developed IO1 - internationalised internship methodology (guidelines for the implementation of internships, recommendations for supervisors and mentors, quality assurance guidelines); IO2 - social innovation implementation framework (guidelines for social innovation implementation, recommendations for social innovation mentors, practical innovation toolbox, impact evaluation and quality assurance recommendations). The Consortium is composed of 4 organisations from 3 different countries, which brings to the project diverse experience and background. 3 forward-looking universities, who emphasize innovation, creativity and societal impact and social partner which is fostering the development of a knowledge-based society has know-how which covers all crucial parts of the project approach: focus on social innovation, intercultural competence, involving social partners and practical application of developed initiatives in real-life. As some partners have already established some separate parts of whole project approach in their institution, co-creation of overall framework for the internationalised internships and social innovation implementation will be based on respect for university autonomy and inclusion of different institutional and learning cultures. Project consortium aims to create a self-sustaining process of internationalised internships programme and believes that this project will serve as a pilot for preparation of internationalised internships programme, thus fostering international collaboration between participating universities and their relevant social partner networks. In order to sustain this process after the project end and to make it easy to scale and apply for different institutions consortium aims to produce framework for internationalised internships which would be inexpensive to sustain and beneficial for participating organisations. Thus, internships will be based on international groups of students working in their respective countries and collaborating via web-based tools. Focusing on real-life problems will strengthen students' capacity and skills to solve complex problems with sustainability principal at the core. Innovative internship method will encourage students to create social innovations as solutions to tackle real-life problems, thus equipping students with the necessary entrepreneurial skills. Universities (mentors) and social partners which will directly participate in internship process will build their know-how on implementing such model of internship and acquire needed understanding and skills in order to produce social value-oriented process with real-life outcome. Thus, leading universities to provide more learning opportunities for students and social partners will result in more effective internships. Implementation of social innovations will foster civic engagement, raise awareness about selected problems and will help to improve the status quo of particular field in national or international context, which will provide benefits for relevant stakeholders (e.g. municipality, citizens) and society.
The project’s goal was to encourage students to acquire needed competencies by participating in internationalized internships (working with a group of students from different countries via web-based applications). That would involve solving real-life problems to create societal value through implementing social innovations (ambition is to spin off those proposals as new projects, programs, organizations, or companies in partner countries). To achieve this, we had several tasks to fulfill: 1. Prepare internationalized internship methodology (guidelines for the implementation of internships, recommendations for supervisors and mentors, quality assurance guidelines); 2. Prepare social innovation implementation framework (guidelines for social innovation implementation, recommendations for social innovation mentors, practical innovation toolbox, impact evaluation, and quality assurance recommendations, guidebook for implementation of “Innovation Race”); 3. Run two rounds of internationalized internships: first (pilot) for evaluating produced results qualitatively to improve them and second to evaluate and improve the scalability of project results.
Society becomes more knowledge-intensive, connected, and interdependent, and one-way issues are replaced by complex problems, raising new requirements for necessary competencies for people in work and everyday life. The Fourth Industrial revolution brought wide automatization in various fields. Low-skilled people become less competitive in the labor market (The EP resolution on creating a competitive EU labor market for the 21st century, 2015). Most of the countries across Europe face similar challenges. An international consortium that would bring different perspectives, diverse backgrounds, and experiences were the obvious choice for tackling these problems. Labour markets’ demand for entrepreneurship, intercultural competence, collaboration, complex problem solving, sustainability, and social innovation skills is high. All of these are often overlooked in the current education system. New innovative methods and approaches were needed to help students succeed. There was a need for higher education institutions to find ways to include novel teaching and collaboration methods in their respective academic systems. Lastly, the academic staff of universities required support and ready-made guidelines for implementing new activities.