University Business Collaboration Platform Erasmus Project

Project Title

University Business Collaboration Platform

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment; Research and innovation

Project Summary

The lack of resources and efficiency generated by the recent financial and economic crisis hit among others students, higher education institutions (HEIs) and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Both HEIs and SMEs are encouraged by policies to jointly generate new knowledge and innovations. HEIs in Europe are operating in an increasingly competitive environment, where they need to cater to diverse stakeholders. In addition, research evaluation considers the impact of university research outside academia. Thus, the HEIs are expected to develop more cooperative links with the business community. At the same time, SMEs need to improve their skills and knowledge, considering their limited resources, so that they can develop their innovation capabilities and improve their competitiveness against bigger players. HEIs tend to seek for links with rather large businesses for reasons of prestige and to access additional funding for their research and teaching activities. Hence, the links between university departments/research centres and SMEs may have been side-lined although they can be beneficial to both sides.
To fill this gap, the proposed programme pursues the objective of conceiving a collaborative cloud based platform that implements a new agile methodology to support higher education institutions to collaborate in innovation processes with businesses across Europe in a systematic and organised way. The cloud based platform will support companies to manage and implement the complex innovation processes by taking advantage of universities’ research and technological knowledge and expertise in a systematic way, by enabling an open multi-agent focused innovation (i.e. HEI/business focused innovation). The term university here means the universities and their associated/local colleges and schools. In any case, vocational colleges are key actors in this proposed project. Many universities have established their own colleges and work closely with vocational providers to support the industry, for instance, the apprentice scheme, especially higher apprentices, has provided a golden opportunity to link the two worlds of academia and work together.
The UniBus project aims to create an effective framework to support business-academia collaboration with several tools and services, which will allow companies to launch innovation challenges to the HEIs, so the students can utilize their talents, train their skills while contributing with their ideas and proposing novel solutions as a part of their studies (assignment for certain course or thesis work). By bringing businesses (especially SMEs) and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) together, European companies can benefit by accessing cutting-edge research, high-tech infrastructure and highly skilled people, while universities will get an opportunity to conduct applied research, demonstrate the impact of their work and get a direct access to the real business needs to further translate them into business-oriented curriculum. While student-to-industry collaboration already exists through capstone projects or code camp/hackathon events, the UniBus framework will make the collaboration easier and more systematic.
The project has a strong industrial and academic basis; putting together the combined efforts of consortium of 7 industrial and academic partners from 3 member states, in the way to strengthen the bond between businesses and HEIs. This big effort will result in a methodology and collaborative platform that will be validated and assessed in predefined business scenarios at these organisations.
The consortium will organise 4 dissemination workshops in partner countries. The aims of the workshops will be dissemination & promotion of the project. The idea is to commit businesses, higher education institutions, students and other relevant actors for adopting the project outcomes by providing them opportunities to participate and contribute to the outcomes in a form of interactive communication in the project events.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 248826 Eur

Project Coordinator

BAHCESEHIR UNIVERSITESI FOUNDATION & Country: TR

Project Partners

• OY MERINOVA AB
• Actuate Inovasyon ve Bilisim Teknolojileri Ticaret A.S.
• Torlak Denizcilik Sanayi ve Ticaret Anonim Sirketi
• LAPPEENRANNAN-LAHDEN TEKNILLINEN YLIOPISTO LUT
• THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL
• CENTRE FOR FACTORIES OF THE FUTURE LIMITED