One way of achieving this ‘open communication’ between academics and the industry, is through co-creation. Co-creation is the cornerstone of open innovation practices in today’s industry. For example, through co-creation, academia can gain useful input from industry, that will eventually lead to more market oriented curriculum and better prepared graduates capable to implement EEO. More recently, the concept of targeted open innovation argues that open innovation should be focused, strategic, and tailored to the current needs of the industry, thus universities need to enhance their curricula accordingly. Hence, open innovation and co-creation between academia and industry/SMEs will highly increase academia's capacity of producing more market oriented curricula that will lead to graduates capable of being next generation leaders in EEO.
To this end, the proposed project (Training for Energy Efficient Operations or TrainERGY) responds to this need by aiming to develop an innovative, evidence-based transnational framework that will markedly improve the knowledge and skills of academic institutions to produce more marked oriented EEO curricula, reducing the barriers in this field. The project consortium comprises key academics, SMEs, and industrial association partners from different sectors who will co-create the envisaged EEO curriculum and will pilot it through an open innovation and co-creation virtual learning environment (VLE).
The specific objectives of TrainERGY are to:
• Establish transnational open collaboration between academia and SMEs across EU in order to address existing training needs in
EEO.
• Define an open-innovation and co-creation framework that will enable a proper development of EEO curricula.
• Co-create EEO curricula (Masters level) with input from the industry/SMEs
• Develop, implement and validate an innovative, evidence-based virtual learning environment (VLE) based on an already developed energy efficiency training tool where feedback from multiple stakeholders (academics, students, industry) will be evaluated and incorporated into the EEO curriculum in an open innovation and co-creation manner.
TrainERGY will have a direct impact on enhancing academia's capacity to produce more market oriented EEO curricula. This outcome is directly pertinent to industry-academia co-operation for innovation and best practices with respect to EEO, and can also support policy reform in this area, leading to more prepared graduates ready for the market. Also, TrainERGY will enable transnational EEO skill development/learning mobility leading to EEO homogeneity in EU.
Overall, TrainERGY follows up the recent plans of the EU to promote improved, efficient and clean operations by 2050 and is also relevant to the EU2020 targets for R&D, climate change and energy efficiency. This makes TrainERGY directly relevant to the current objectives of the participating organizations.
Additionally, TrainERGY is aligned with the goals of Strategic Partnerships for academia-industry collaboration and the promotion of innovation and best practices. Accordingly, TrainERGY is in line with the Headline Education Target (from EU2020) and with the EU Higher Education Modernisation Agenda by providing incentives for higher education internationalization, market-oriented curriculum development, and co-creation with business through integrated features that will lead on the long term of better involvement and support from the industry side to academia. Similarly, TrainERGY is in line with the European cooperation in education and training (ET2020) strategy by fostering life-long-learning, improving the quality of education through industrial engagement, and promoting creative thinking towards EEO.
