How do you shape your organization to ensure that your processes, services and products are as innovative as possible? This question became the design challenge chosen for the CIM training workshop on Design Thinking held in Palermo, from the 9th to the 13th of December 2019.
More than 40 professionals coming from 9 European countries participated in the transnational learning mobility of CIM project in Palermo. The CIM training was organized by CESIE in collaboration with the local partner CNR, Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche (ITD), who made its premises available for the collaborative work of project managers, professors, researchers, consultants from business, academia and third sector. The training was provided by a team of experts from the University of Duisburg Essen and blinc.
The first day started with an introduction by the coordinator of CIM project, Tim Scholze, who presented the aims of the project and the structure of the training. After an introduction to the concept of entrepreneurship and the method of Design Thinking, he introduced the concept of blended learning in CIM and the learning platform.
To start a practical demonstration of how it works the blended learning, at the beginning of the training week in Palermo, all the participants created a personal profile on the CIM workspace on the learning suite Mathetics. The learning suite serves as a virtual development space for the project workgroups to plan their projects and deliver their ideas up to the prototype stage. It contains all the working tools for the training CIM and allows collaboration and exchange among the participants.
The other step was to conduct a Self-assessment in the area “Spotting ideas and opportunities”. The questionnaire related to the first part of the EntreComp competence Framework: The Competence to create ideas and opportunities.
After this pre-assessment of competences, the team work started following the Design Thinking steps. The Design Thinking Challenge identified, that guided the work of the 5 days, was “How do you shape your organization so that you always ensure that your processes, services and products are as innovative as possible? The workshop was structured following the steps of Design Thinking method: Understand, Observe, Point of View, Ideate, Prototype.
The team groups, facilitated by the experts, applied the creative thinking processes to answer the main challenge, and presented day by days results in form of videos, presentations, plays.
To the Design Thinking process have been associated also a theoretical contribution provided by Georgios Zarifis, Professor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who described the challenges and barriers to innovation in the Higher Education system and how educators and employers should work together to innovate, not for innovation’s sake, but to support student success. Marta Caetano, lecturer at Polytechnic of Leiria, explained why creative thinking is a skill that can be learned and not a talent.
Finally, a reflection on how to integrate this approach in the working environments of the project partners. In 2020 each institution partner of CIM will activate learning paths for students, interns and employees.
About the project
CIM – Promoting Creativity and Innovation Management in an innovative blended learning and validation programme at the interface between higher education (HE) and business is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme – KA2 Cooperation for innovation and exchange of good practices – Knowledge Alliances for Higher Education.
Partners
CIM partnership:
- Coordinator: Universitaet Duisburg-Essen (Germany)
- Deutsches Institut fuer Erwachsenenbildung eV Leibniz-Zentrum (Germany)
- Blended learning institutions cooperative (Germany)
- Q21 – Agentur fur qualifizierungs und transfermanagement gmbh (Germany)
- Joker Toerisme nV (Belgium)
- Trendhuis (Belgium)
- Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant’Anna (Italy)
- Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy)
- Vilniaus Universitetas (Lithuania)
- Lietuvos Pramonininku Konfederacija (Lithuania)
- Aristotelio panepistimio thessalonikis (Greece)
- Catro (Bulgaria)
- Die Berater Unternehmensberatungs Gesellschaft mbh (Austria)
- Dublin City University (Ireland)
- Instituto Politecnico de Leiria (Portugal)
- CESIE (Italy)
For further information
Read more aboout CIM.
Visit the website: cim-project.eu/
Contact Caterina Impastato: caterina.impastato@cesie.org.
