The initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology is part of the EIT's Strategic Innovation Agenda for 2021-2027. It supports higher education institutions with expertise and coaching, access to the EIT's innovation ecosystem, and funding. This gives an opportunity to develop action plans for innovation and creating synergies between industry and universities.

56 consortia representing over 680 organizations from all over Europe applied for this year's second edition of the EIT HEI competition. Ultimately, co-financing was awarded to 26 projects, including the "IDEATION" initiative, the leader and originator of which is a team from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Wrocław University of Technology.

The main aim of the IDEATION project is to transform participating higher education institutions into universities with significantly increased entrepreneurship and innovation potential, while increasing their impact on the surrounding ecosystems - explains Dr. Mariusz Cholewa, project manager.

The objectives of the project are to:

• digitally open resources, raise awareness, and enable access to competencies, experiences and infrastructure through a new format of digital services;
• strengthen partnerships within the knowledge triangle by creating space for setting up collaborative networks and creating opportunities for establishing new cooperation;
• test and popularise open innovation-based approaches to directly speed up the innovation process within HEIs and their ecosystems;
• increase the quality of innovation and support entrepreneurial education via the pre-incubation programme and international open innovation training.

As part of the project, we will develop and implement mechanisms that will contribute to increasing innovation and entrepreneurial skills of the academic community of Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, as well as prepare adaptation plans and transfer of best practices from more experienced universities to others - explains Dr. Joanna Helman

In project activities, we will use, among others, platforms and tools that our team has built as part of "SYNERGY" - the previous international project in which we were a leader. Thanks to this, we will continue our activities supporting the development of open innovation and the sharing economy. Our goal is to strengthen innovation and entrepreneurship at the university. At the application stage, we conducted a detailed self-assessment in the areas of entrepreneurship, innovation, commercialization and technology transfer. The project itself is a response to the diagnosed weaknesses in this area, occurring at our university - adds Dr. Maria Rosienkiewicz.

In the competition, our university received a grant of up to EUR 1.2 million. The project is scheduled for two years - until June 2024. In addition to the team from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and AIP Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, the IDEATION project will include the Holon Institute of Technology (Israel), University of La Laguna (Spain), Institute for Industrial Management (Germany), Center of Research and Technological Innovation (Italy).

By implementing the actions, IDEATION aims to:

• support nine start-up/scale-ups;
• train 800 and mentor 66 students;
• train 170 and mentor 16 academic staff;
• train 170 and mentor 16 non-academic staff;
• improve 62 support structures and mechanisms;
• establish three new partnerships.

Startups from Wroclaw University of Science and Technology will take part in an intensive, international incubation program, in which the Lean Startup and Design Thinking methods as well as crowdsourcing and crowdfunding mechanisms will be used, which will be individually tailored to the needs of each idea, says Dr. Anna Górecka, director of the Academic Entrepreneurship Incubator of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology.

The aim of the project is to build an ecosystem based on a permanent network of connections and cooperation, which will constitute the basis for the development of ideas derived from the Wrocław University of Science and Technology and an effective didactic process in the area of ​​entrepreneurship and innovation - emphasizes Dr. Mateusz Molasy.

The project will be implemented at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering by the Innoman team, which includes Dr. Mariusz Cholewa, dr inż. Joanna Helman, dr inż. Maria Rosienkiewicz, dr inż. Mateusz Molasy and in the Academic Incubator of Entrepreneurship by dr inż. Anna Górecka with the support of the Pwr Management Department.

More on the Ideation website.