The students:
- Learn how to design and run innovation tournaments: a science-based model for the generation, selection, and development of innovation opportunities.
- Apply this model in practice – starting with idea creation and finishing with fundraising – students will compete to develop their innovation opportunity and/or solve a practical challenge (involvement of industry).
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According to its original developers, innovation tournaments are most successful for solving highly unstructured questions. Therefore, in this course we alternate ‘open’ innovation tournaments that allow students to pursue their own novel robotics related ideas, with challenge-based innovation tournaments for which we invite industry partners to present innovation challenges for the students to work on. During the Innovation Tournament students learn to generate novel ideas/solutions and develop these into robust opportunities to solve a technological-entrepreneurial challenge. Based on scientific principles, the innovation tournament starts with many ideas developed by individuals. A few rounds of pitching and voting help to filter out mediocre ideas but allow the most promising ideas to proceed to the team phase. After this individual phase teams are formed that develop these ideas into full-grown technical solutions / business opportunities. This team phase consists of multiple phases – running from customer needs analysis to prototyping to evaluating the financial merits of the developed solution. A final investment market (where teams pitch their solutions/business opportunities and each student virtually invested 100.000 Euro) decides the winner of this tournament.
Assessment
Students finish multiple deliverables (one per tournament phase); together they are used to create an integrated project report.
The project exam consists of:
- an individual component with a 20% weight.
- a group component with an 80% weight.
The weighted average needs to be 5,5 or above to pass this course.
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