Innovation Challenges (ECIU)

The term innovation challenge refers to a practical project which enables you to develop your expertise and creativity, set goals and achieve them together with your team. You will gain first-hand experience of innovation projects and apply your acquired knowledge in practice.   

Learners will influence the learning outcomes they achieve by setting their own learning objectives and forming their own challenges. In addition to learners’ individual learning outcomes we have listed certain learning outcomes that will be common to all of thoser who complete the course by applying team learning methods and the design thinking process. 

Upon completion of the course, you will:  

• understand the design thinking principles in the context of an innovation project  
• be able to test ideas with different target groups
• be able to consider the user perspective when resolving challenges
• be able to work effectively in a multidisciplinary and international team 
• be able to challenge your own thinking and trust your team
• receive feedback about your strengths, competencies and expertise
• be able to pitch your solution in English

From October 25^th to December 17^th 2021. 
Sessions on Mondays and Thursdays @14:15-16:00 (UTC+2, Finnish time).

To pass the course, you must demonstrate commitment to team learning and to the challenge you formed. You will be expected to team up with your fellow learners and generate potential solutions, plan the testing of ideas, and develop ideas into functional solutions. You and your team must propose diverse solutions to the client.    

The learner will receive a failing grade if they are not able to independently describe the importance and purpose of the course learning outcomes for his or her learning and that of the team. Similarly, the learner will fail the course if he or she does not contribute to the activities set out in the team’s project plan and to resolving the provided challenge.    

The plaftform which enables learners, researchers, business, public organizations and citizens, to create relevant innovative solutions for real life challenges with real societal impact. 

The ECIU University is an initiative of the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU alliance) that creates a ground-breaking and innovative educational model on a European scale. Through the initiative, ECIU alliance builds the ECIU University with open and flexible system, an entire new concept of the European University for the future. 

The City of Tampere has a strong brand image and manages to attract talents from all over the world, but face difficulties retaining them. Tampere is an attractive city of study, but only about 50% of university graduates live in the city a year after graduation. There are many factors which influence a talent’s decision, but finding employment is one of the most essential. The challenge is to find appropriate methods to enhance international talent integration and identify activities, opportunities and other factors which would help talents to settle in and prosper in the longer term.

Check out the full description of the challenge here (opens ups on a new tab).

Operating a forestry machine is very demanding, users need to do thousands of big and small decisions every day, the cognitive load is so high that one night’s sleep might not be enough for the operator to regain the productivity of the previous day but most importantly, over time it may have a negative effect on their well-being. At the same time the machines are getting more aware of their surroundings and more autonomous. In long run the forestry machines will become completely autonomous in easier environments, but operators will still be needed in more demanding ones, though their role will become more of help and supervision towards the machine. How can we evolve the human-machine interaction so that operators become machine guiders and supervisors? Most importantly, how do we guarantee the task is still meaningful and interesting enough for the human but not overly demanding? How can we harmoniously evolve the roles of humans and machine so that more people would see it as highly rewarding work, where the human is seen as respected advisor rather than a mere operator?

Check out the full description of the challenge here (opens up on a new tab).