The Technical Departments at the Fontys University of Professional Education in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, offer a course which is devel-oped around the principles of Concurrent Engi-neering. Integrated Product Development (IPD) project teams are multi-disciplinary groups which develop products in co-operation with the regional industry. The companies involved are sponsoring the developments and the revenue is being used for more intensive group coaching by tutors and specialists. We experimented with communication technology to find a good compromise between time and costs. It turned out that intelligent pagers resulted in minor improvements, mobile phones are still too expensive, e-mail is functional but creates no group cohesion and most of the com-panies are rather conservative in their use of new communication tools. We also found out that the use of a Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW) server is a possibility for information interchange as an alternative for e-mail attachments. The server is also used as an archive. In future we expect that CSCW will be an effective tool for project sup-port and control.
An investigation in the learning effects of integrated development projects. In two subsequent semesters the students were asked how they rated their competencies at the start of the project as well as at the end of it. The students voluntarily filled out a questionnaire. After the last questionnaire a number of students were also interviewed in order to learn more about their perceptions. It was a remarkable outcome of these interviews that a lot of students tended to give themselves lower ratings in the end if they met any difficulties in for instance communication or co-operation during the project. Then the questionnaire showed a decrease in the student's ratings, while anyone else would say the student did learn something after recognizing these difficulties. It required a different interpretation of the outcomes of the questionnaires. The investigation showed that co-operating in general and in multidisciplinary teams in particular, co-operating with companies and also working according to plans are the four objectives that are recognized mostly by the students. The factors that actually contribute to, or block, the learning effects remained unknown yet.
This paper explores how, in the light of global economic downturn and rising student populations, new academic-industrial models for research collaboration based upon specific technological expertise and knowledge can be developed as potential mechanisms for preserving and extending central university research infrastructure. The paper explores two case studies that focus upon the new serious games sector: the UK-based Coventry University's Serious Games Institute - a hybrid model of applied research and business, and the Netherlands-based TU-Delft University's Serious Game Center - a networked model of semi-commercial funding and public-private co-operation between industry, public sector and research partners. To facilitate these kinds of academic-industrial collaborations, the paper introduces the Innovation Diffusion Model (IDM) which promotes innovation diffusion by bringing academic and industrial experts into close proximity. Overall, the benefits include: sustained intellectual property development and publication opportunities for academics, employment creation, accelerated development and real commercial benefits for industrial partners.
ILIAD builds on the assets resulting from two decades of investments in policies and infrastructures for the blue economy and aims at establishing an interoperable, data-intensive, and cost-effective Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO). It capitalizes on the explosion of new data provided by many different earth sources, advanced computing infrastructures (cloud computing, HPC, Internet of Things, Big Data, social networking, and more) in an inclusive, virtual/augmented, and engaging fashion to address all Earth Data challenges. It will contribute towards a sustainable ocean economy as defined by the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Ocean, a hub for global, multi-stakeholder co-operation.
In the coming four years, the Hedwige-Prosperpolder in the Schelde estuary will be reopened for nature restoration. This creates opportunities, within a binational Dutch-Belgian consortium, to experiment with the existing dike and to perform targeted dike breach experiments and breach monitoring. We will exploit this opportunity to investigate a newly described, potentially valuable contribution of vegetated foreshores to flood safety: the restriction of dike breach extent, and thus of flooding volume, in the case of failure of the dike. Fostering marsh development in front of realigned dikes could improve safety more than hitherto thought. Not only does it reduce dike failure probabilities, it may also restrict the consequences of failures. Even though this is not the primary goal of the HPP realignment, in this Living Lab we will study how management realignment can be used as a nature-based solution for flood safety. We will model the contribution of vegetated foreshores to breach development, calculate its contribution to reduction of risks, and validate the model using the breach experiment. We will also study the conditions for, and rates of, vegetation and soil strength development in front of realigned dikes. We will explore novel designs and maintenance schemes for realigned dikes connected to a vegetated foreshore. Finally, we will study how people experience physical changes in the landscape in terms of place attachment: will they be reconnected to the changed landscape when properly informed on the new role of this landscape in ecosystem development and safety enhancement? The project consortium is composed of engineers, ecologists and social scientists with a strong track record in multidisciplinary co-operation. It is externally supported by national and regional water authorities, contractors and engineering companies. It is ideally situated to translate new knowledge into operational procedures, and incorporate this into the education of future coastal professionals.
