Entrepreneurial Education

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology, a body of the European Union, proposes a model for higher education aiming at the equipping students with innovation and entrepreneurial competencies. In line with the EIT guidelines, we have set the basis for creating special double degree Master programs in engineering. These programs offered technical students the opportunity to develop transversal skills through international mobility, exposure to industry, hands-on and team work activity, innovation and entrepreneurial learning modules. Developing these programs builds a shared vision among EIT Manufacturing and the participant universities, but also the definition of operational mechanisms and agreements to be able to jointly deliver the didactic program - promotion, student admission, career, evaluation, graduation – and to manage the financial aspects concerning fees, waivers, scholarships and other grants.

The design of the scheme has requested some effort, and the design of a sequence of steps:

• call for challenge owners (companies) to collect and select relevant industrial challenges
• call for solver teams (universities and VETs), to select the solving students team and hosting universities willing and competent to address the selected challenges
• matching & collaboration. The challenges and the solver teams are then matched, so that each challenge is addressed by two or more student teams, who work for several weeks in collaboration with the challenge owners and backed by their university and come up with a proposed solution.
• pitch event & competition. Finally, each team pitches in front of the companies and the jury, competing for the prize. This competition is very appreciated by the companies as well as by the students.

EIT Manufacturing Master School - EIT Labelled Double Degree

A similar but simpler scheme was adopted for the EIT Manufacturing Doctoral Program, in which selected PhD students from different universities entered a special path aiming at the venture creation.

EIT Manufacturing Doctoral School - EIT Labelled Programme

Industry-University Collaboration: Teaching Factory Competition

Higher Education is often struggling to offer students the opportunity to get insight into the “real” business and industrial world; what are the challenges that managers and employees have to address; what the boundary conditions or constraints they need to cope with; how they frame and conduct their analysis, identify possible solutions, and make decisions.

The Teaching Factory Competition program, that we have launched in EIT Manufacturing contributes to overcoming this limitation of several higher education institutions, by framing and facilitating a purposeful collaboration between industry, academia, and students on concrete industrial challenges. Furthermore, it offers an ideal setting to implement challenge-based learning, helping students develop key transversal skills.