PEOPLE brings together Higher Education Institutions from the social sciences and industries from the sustainable living and energy sector to jointly develop and integrate people-centred development approaches into research, teaching and learning practices. At the core of the project is the idea that understanding people should become an indispensable part of industrial development processes, as a means to achieve practical-based education as well as new categories of products, services, or business strategies that truly address people’s needs and lead to sustainable innovation.PEOPLE addresses 3 urgent challenges for the European Union: 1. the underemployment of European graduates in sociology, psychology and anthropology fields;2. a lack of social science expertise in the sustainable living and energy sector;3. the need for better-engaged social science learning in Higher Education.The key innovative contribution is the implementation of People-centred Learning Cycles as a novel pedagogical approach that brings together interdisciplinary groups of students, faculty educators and industry professionals to solve real-life business challenges. New learning modules will be embedded in degree programmes, enabling students to gain valuable practical skills to complement their theoretical education, while demonstrating the value of that education for industry.PEOPLE is a consortium of industry representatives, Higher Education Institutions and intermediary organization based in Slovenia, Czech Republic, the UK and the Netherlands. The project adopts an aggressive exploitation strategy to sustain the activities, results and partnership also beyond the project lifetime, such as: -sponsorship process to support people-centred project extension or cultivate a new project topic;-offer students an internship, cooperative education or part-time experience;-institutionalize the people-centred learning cycles in the existing study courses using the ECTS system.
The key challenge addressed by the PEOPLE project is the skills mismatch between sociology, psychology and anthropology graduates across Europe and the requirements of the industry. This affects the job satisfaction and wages of graduates, while at the same time diminishing the productivity and innovative potential of companies. The situation is exacerbated by the failure of society at large and the business world in particular to understand how young people educated in the above-mentioned fields could contribute towards improving products, services and processes or by driving innovation in rapidly evolving technology areas. The qualification mismatch and relatively high unemployment rate of young graduates prevents countries from realising the full potential of their labour force and to some extent also leaves young graduates unfulfilled. At the core of the project is the idea that understanding people should become an indispensable part of industrial development processes, as a means to achieve practical-based education as well as new categories of products, services, or business strategies that truly address people’s needs and lead to sustainable innovation. The key innovative contribution of the PEOPLE project is the development and implementation of People-centred Learning Cycles (PLC) as a novel pedagogical approach and model. PLCs take a learner-centred and real problem-based teaching and learning approach, bringing together students, university educators, business professionals, and users/community members. These interdisciplinary teams work on actual business and societal challenges and jointly co-create and test new or improved solutions for challenging issues in the area of sustainable living and energy efficiency. These solutions are tailored to the needs of users and communities and lead to innovation in the business sector (in product, service, and/or process). PLCs are based on the following beyond state-of-the-art principles: (1) interdisciplinary and essentially collaborative: bringing together different disciplines and expertise, where engineering works hand in hand with social sciences and humanities. The key guiding principle is “dare to see things from other perspectives than your own”;(2) multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder: involving industry professionals, university teachers and representatives of civil society and non-governmental organizations;(3) people as co-creators: involved in all stages of product and service development process;(4) rooted in ethnography: as a methodology to collect, analyse and understand data and generate in-depth insights about peoples’ behaviours, practices, and needs; (5) in dialogue with theory and bringing up ethical considerations: understanding bigger contexts of emerging futures and world’s challenges.To ensure long-term sustainability of results and cooperation activities, the PEOPLE project has developed 5 key sustainability strategies:(1) Integration of PEOPLE learning cycle methodology in existing/new study programmes of university partners.(2) Implementing new PEOPLE case studies with existing or new partners on national/regional basis.(3) PEOPLE community and PEOPLE ambassadors.(4) Specialized trainings and consultancy on “How to make your own PEOPLE project”.(5) PEOPLE as part of larger initiatives to influence policy developments at national and European levels.