The University of Malta’s Edward de Bono Institute has joined as a partner of the European Network for Open Innovation (OI Net), an EU-funded Lifelong Learning project.
The three-year project, worth a total of nearly €900,000, brings together 52 higher education and other institutions, including public bodies, enterprises and associations active in innovation management, either through teaching and research or through practice, consulting and training. The project will reach out to the business world to collect user needs and to collaborate in the development of the teaching materials and guidelines.
The teaching of open innovation is still fragmented and inconsistent. OI-Net aims to fill the gap of lack of common understanding on open innovation teaching by reinforcing up-to-date innovation education to foster European competitiveness and development. The partners in the network will draw upon their own extensive experience of teaching innovation management and researching open innovation.
OI-Net partners will collaborate and share their expertise on teaching open innovation to validate their methodologies with colleagues and to collect data from the business sector regarding the demand for graduates with skills and knowledge on open innovation. The Common Curricula Framework will be used in this project to allow educators to access the pool of teaching material and guidelines compiled as part of the project.
On conclusion of the project, a platform with open source materials will be hosted by project coordinator Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland, (LUT) and other partners identified for this task during the project, and updates will be conducted on a regular basis via contacts with network members.
LUT has been pioneering open innovation research for about 14 years. In 2013, it became one of Europe’s first universities to offer an Erasmus intensive course called Open Innovation Clinic, in collaboration with universities from Germany, Hungary, and Estonia, who are also part of OI-Net consortium.
The Edward de Bono Institute is involved in comparing and developing curricula and education on open innovation, and in the dissemination and exploiting the project results, which will be applied in its Master’s in Creativity and Innovation.
For details e-mail: instituteofthinking@um.edu.mt.
www.um.edu.mt/create