The importance of teaching engineering students innovation development is commonly clearly understood. It is essential to achieve products which are attractive and profitable in the market. To achieve this, an institute of engineering education has to provide students with needed knowledge, skills and attitudes including both technical and business orientation. This is important especially for SME’s. Traditionally, education of engineering provides students with basic understanding how to solve common technical problems. However companies need wider view to achieve new products. Universities of applied Sciences in Oulu and Eindhoven want to research what is the today’s educational situation for this aim, to find criteria to improve the content of the educational system, and to improve the educational system. Important stakeholders are teachers and students within the institute but also key-persons in companies. The research is realized by questionnaires and interviews from which a current situation can be found. The research will also include the opinion of management who give possibilities to change the curriculum. By this research more insight will be presented about how to re-design a current curriculum. The research will act as basis for this discussion in SEFI-conference about formulating a curriculum that includes elements for wide-ranging knowledge and skills to achieve innovations especially in SME’s.
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The importance of teaching engineering students innovation development is commonly clearly understood. It is essential to achieve products which are attractive and profitable in the market. To achieve this, an institute of engineering education has to provide students with needed knowledge, skills and attitudes including both technical and business orientation. This is important especially for SME’s. Traditionally, education of engineering provides students with basic understanding how to solve common technical problems. However companies need wider view to achieve new products. Universities of applied Sciences in Oulu and Eindhoven want to research what is the today’s educational situation for this aim, to find criteria to improve the content of the educational system, and to improve the educational system. Important stakeholders are teachers and students within the institute but also key-persons in companies. The research is realized by questionnaires and interviews from which a current situation can be found. The research will also include the opinion of management who give possibilities to change the curriculum. By this research more insight will be presented about how to re-design a current curriculum. The research will act as basis for this discussion in SEFI-conference about formulating a curriculum that includes elements for wide-ranging knowledge and skills to achieve innovations especially in SME’s.
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In the fall of 1999, we started, the Integrated Product Development- Collaborative Engineering ( IPD-CE) project as a first pilot. We experimented with modern communication technology in order to find useful tools for facilitating the cooperative work and the contacts of all the participants. Teams have been formed with engineering students from Lehigh University in the US, the Fontys University in Eindhoven, The Netherlands and from the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany. In the fall of 2000 we continued and also cooperated with the Finnish Oulu Polytechnic. It turned out that group cohesion stayed low (students did not meet in real life), and that Internet is not mature enough yet for desktop video conferencing. Chatting and email were in these projects by far the most important communication media. We also found out that the use of a Computer Support for Cooperative Work (CSCW) server is a possibility for information interchange. The server can also be used as an electronic project archive. Points to optimise are: 1. We didn't fully match the complete assignments of the groups; 2. We allowed the groups to divide the work in such parts that those were developed and prototyped almost locally; 3. We haven't guided the fall 2000 teams strong enough along our learning curve and experiences from previous groups. 4. We didn't stick strong enough to the, by the groups developed, protocols for email and chat sessions. 5. We should facilitate video conferencing via V-span during the project to enhance the group performance and commitment.
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Nowadays companies need higher educated engineers to develop their competences to enable them to innovate. This innovation competence is seen as a remedy for the minor profitable business they do during the financial crises. Innovation is an element to be developed on the one hand for big companies as well as for small-and-medium sized companies through Europe to overcome this crisis. The higher education can be seen as an institution where youngsters, coming from secondary schools, who choose to learn at higher education to realize their dream, what they like to become in the professional world. The tasks of the Universities of applied Sciences are to prepare these youngsters to become starting engineers doing their job well in the companies. Companies work for a market, trying to manufacture products which customers are willing to pay for. They ask competent employees helping achieving this goal. It is important these companies inform the Universities of applied Sciences in order to modify their educational program in such a way that the graduated engineers are learning the latest knowledge and techniques, which they need to know doing their job well. The Universities of applied Sciences of Oulu (Finland) and Fontys Eindhoven (The Netherlands) are working together to experience possibilities to qualify their students on innovation development in an international setting. In the so-called: ‘Invention Project’, students are motivated to find their own invention, to design it, to prepare this idea for prototyping and to really manufacture it. Organizing the project, special attention is given to communication protocol between students and also between teachers. Students have meetings on Thursday every week through Internet connection with the communication program OPTIMA, which is provided by the Oulu University. Not only the time difference between Finland and the Netherlands is an issue to be organized also effective protocols how to provide each other relevant information and also how to make in an effective way decisions are issues. In the paper the writers will present opinions of students, teachers and also companies in both regions of Oulu and Eindhoven on the effectiveness of this project reaching the goal students get more experienced to set up innovative projects in an international setting. The writers think this is an important and needed competence for nowadays young engineers to be able to create lucrative inventions for companies where they are going to work for. In the paper the writers also present the experiences of the supervising conditions during the project. The information found will lead to success-factors and do’s and don’ts for future projects with international collaboration.
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The pace of introduction of new technology and thus continuous change in skill needs at workplaces, especially for the engineers, has increased. While digitization induced changes in manufacturing, construction and supply chain sectors may not be felt the same in every sector, this will be hard to escape. Both young and experienced engineers will experience the change, and the need to continuously assess and close the skills gap will arise. How will we, the continuing engineering educators and administrators will respond to it? Prepared for engineering educators and administrators, this workshop will shed light on the future of continuing engineering education as we go through exponentially shortened time frames of technological revolution and in very recent time, in an unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. S. Chakrabarti, P. Caratozzolo, E. Sjoer and B. Norgaard.
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This research concerning the experience and future of zoos was carried out from 2011-2012 and takes regional ideas concerning Zoo Emmen as well as global visions into account. The research focuses partly on Zoo Emmen, its present attractions and visitors while also comparing and contrasting visions on the future in relationship to other international zoos in the world. In this way, remarkable experiences and ideas will be identified and in the light of them, it can serve as inspiration for stakeholders of zoos at large. The main research subject is a look at the future zoos in view of: The Zoo Experience – an international experience benchmark; The Zoo of the Future – a Scenario Planning approach towards the future; The virtual zoo - zoo’s in the internet domain.
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In the fall of 1999, an international integrated product development pilot project based on collaborative engineering was started with team members in two international teams from the United States, The Netherlands and Germany. Team members interacted using various Internet capabilities, including, but not limited to, ICQ (means: I SEEK YOU, an internet feature which immediately detects when somebody comes "on line"), web phones, file servers, chat rooms and Email along with video conferencing. For this study a control group with all members located in the USA only also worked on the same project.
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This paper is a case report of why and how CDIO became a shared framework for Community Service Engineering (CSE) education. CSE can be defined as the engineering of products, product-service combinations or services that fulfill well-being and health needs in the social domain, specifically for vulnerable groups in society. The vulnerable groups in society are growing, while fewer people work in health care. Finding technical, interdisciplinary solutions for their unmet needs is the territory of the Community Service Engineer. These unmet needs arise in local niche markets as well as in the global community, which makes it an interesting area for innovation and collaboration in an international setting. Therefore, five universities from Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Sweden decided to work together as hubs in local innovation networks to create international innovation power. The aim of the project is to develop education on undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels. The partners are not aiming at a joined degree or diploma, but offer a shared short track blended course (3EC), which each partner can supplement with their own courses or projects (up to 30EC). The blended curriculum in CSE is based on design thinking principles. Resources are shared and collaboration between students and staff is organized at different levels. CDIO was chosen as the common framework and the syllabus 2.0 was used as a blueprint for the CSE learning goals in each university. CSE projects are characterized by an interdisciplinary, human centered approach leading to inter-faculty collaboration. At the university of Porto, EUR-ACE was already used as the engineering education framework, so a translation table was used to facilitate common development. Even though Thomas More and KU Leuven are no CDIO partner, their choice for design thinking as the leading method in the post-Masters pilot course insured a good fit with the CDIO syllabus. At this point University West is applying for CDIO and they are yet to discover what the adaptation means for their programs and their emerging CSE initiatives. CDIO proved to fit well to in the authentic open innovation network context in which engineering students actively do CSE projects. CDIO became the common language and means to continuously improve the quality of the CSE curriculum.
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the role of higher education in fostering young professionals’ global competence
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In September 2009 the department of Engineering of Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands has started a pilot honours program for excellent engineering students called PRogram OUstanding Development (PROUD). Aim of this program is to give those engineering students, who have the ambition, the opportunity to work on extra profession related challenges in their study. By means of this PROUD program Fontys University of Applied Sciences is responding to the wishes of students for extra curricular activities and increasing need from the industry for excellent professionals with an extra level of theoretical knowledge and practical experience. In this paper the courses offered at the Engineering department of the Fontys University of Applied Sciences are discussed. Different study possibilities/routings for students were developed depending on earlier acquainted competences, adaptation abilities to our system (special possibilities for slow starters) and tracking and tracing by intensive study coaching. This resulted in an improvement of the yield of students to 74% of students started in 2008. After working successfully on reducing the drop out rate of our engineering students the department focused on possibilities for excellent students. The department started the PROUD pilot together with engaged engineering students. In 2008 engineering students have carried out a research among their fellow students, lecturers, other institutes [1] and industry. This resulted in a quite different approach of an honours program for the department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. In the PROUD program the student is stimulated to personally shape his educational career and to explicitly work on developing his own competences. The PROUD excellent program starts after the first year and extends to at least 3 semesters in the following years. The student, guided by a supervisor and outside the regular study time, is working on building an excellent portfolio at the university as well as in industry. During this period the PROUD student will work in industry one day a week in average. This is on top of his bachelor educational program. The students will receive an excellent honours certificate together with their bachelor's degree at the end of the study to express their honourable work. Each year about 20 students apply for a place in PROUD but thus far only about 3-4 passed the first interview round. It turns out that student, university and industry are eager to participate in this PROUD program.
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