The Europe 2020 strategy identifies actions to boost growth and jobs. The HEIBus project addresses the flagship of innovation union, youth on the move and agenda for new skills and jobs. The HEIBus project develops smart and innovative methods including virtual implementations for HEI-company cooperation for mutual benefit. Project develops following cooperation types:- Multidisciplinary Real Life Problem Solving (RLPS)- Expert Level Real Life Problem Solving (EXPERT)- Flexible Mentoring of Students by Companies (Flex Mentoring)In RLPS, teams of students are given a real life problem by a company. The student teams compete against each other in solving the problem. The same method is planned on virtual implementation. This improves performance of education system, facilitating entry of students to the labour market and developing students’ skills on real life cases. For companies this promotes new research and innovations and helps the development of new products and services. The companies benefit by getting better match for their labour needs, including easier path to labour mobility.EXPERT is similar method as RLPS, but in this the problem solving is done by HEI experts. This enables companies to bring more complex problems to be solved. This promotes innovation and knowledge transfer throughout the union and increases the skills of HEI experts and work life relevance of education.Flex Mentoring is set of methods to involve companies in education at HEIs. Each company has a student group they are mentoring throughout the studies of the group. These methods are divided on different levels depending on the amount of involvement needed from the company. Flex Mentoring improves the quality and work life relevance of the education, gives HEI students and staff new skills and work life contacts. For companies Flex Mentoring gives better labour force, easy access to recruiting and to knowledge transfer from HEIs.
The Europe 2020 strategy identifies actions to boost growth and jobs. The HEIBus project addresses the flagship of innovation union, youth on the move and agenda for new skills and jobs. The main HEIBus contributions have been the developed models designed to boost the cooperation actions between HEIs and companies. Using previous experience from other European project and new and fresh ideas, innovative models have been generated, tested and imported to new implementations. The project started with a comprehensive review of HEI-company cooperation models to identify and analyze implementations where students were directly involved in collaborative actions with HEI experts and companies. Models in which HEI experts and companies work together to the same end, were also studied. In addition, different levels of company involvement in education at HEIs were also searched and detailed. The purpose of this review was to serve as basis for the further HEIBus model implementations. Throughout the HEIBus, two rounds of project implementations took place. The feedback from the first round of projects was used to improve the implementations done in the second one. With the aim of providing smart and innovative cooperation methods between HEIs and companies, the following models were tested: - Multidisciplinary Real Life Problem Solving (RLPS)- Expert Level Real Life Problem Solving (EXPERT)- Flexible Mentoring of Students by Companies (Flex Mentoring)In RLPS, teams of students were given a real life problem by a company. The student teams compete against each other to solve the problem, in the most effective way and following the company requirements. The same method is planned on virtual implementation. This improves performance of education system, facilitating the entry of students to the labour market and developing students’ skills on real life cases. For companies, this promotes new research and innovations and helps the development of new products and services. The companies benefit by getting better match for their labour needs, including easier path to labour mobility. In addition, this cooperation model can be easily integrated in engineering courses that follows Project Based Learning methodologies.EXPERT is similar to RLPS but, on this occasion, the problem is solved by HEI experts. This enables companies to bring more complex problems to be solved. This promotes innovation and knowledge transfer throughout the union, and increases the skills of HEI experts and work life relevance of education. In this case, the links established between the companies and HEI experts involved in the different cases of study, continue after the HEIBus through the Expert Support Service web platform. Flex Mentoring is a set of methods to involve companies in education at HEIs. Each company has a student group, mentored throughout the studies of the group. These methods are divided on different levels depending on the amount of involvement needed from the company. Flex Mentoring improves the quality and work life relevance of the education, gives HEI students and staff new skills and work life contacts. For companies, Flex Mentoring gives better labour force, easy access to recruiting and to knowledge transfer from HEIs. The number and quality of the dissemination activities, done in the three year project, demonstrate the utility and significance of the HEIBus models.