Demola, The Upcoming Win-Win Relationship Between University and Industry

DEMOLA, THE UPCOMING WIN-WIN RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN UNIVERSITY AND INDUSTRY

Ph D Daniel Einarson

Computer Science, Kristianstad University, Sweden

Demola Facilitator and Manager Henrik Lundblad

Lund University, Lund, Sweden

ABSTRACT The fundamentals of CDIO lie in desires from industry for educations to provide students with experiences in developing real world systems and products. Still, CDIO does, neither in the standards nor in the syllabus, explicitly point out that experiences should take place in direct cooperation with industry. Propositions from universities, according such work based learning to improve employability, do, however, point out that industry close projects are strongly encouraged. Still, while it is easy to argue about the win-win of such projects, there seems generally to be strong barriers of resistance towards actually realizing such projects, both from university and industry. Hence, approaching new fundamental ecosystems that illuminates on the roles of those two participants should be strongly encouraged.

Demola, originating from Tampere, Finland, is a collaborative open innovation platform for students, universities and companies. Its successful award-winning approach has influenced several other European regions to participate in the Demola network. The concept relies on well-established agreements between universities, students and companies. Companies act with low risk and may experiment on innovative real-life systems with help from multi-disciplinary student teams. Projects are controlled by contracts between a student group and a company, where satisfactory developments are financially regulated. Here, innovation is in focus which makes Demola clearly different from more practice oriented work based projects. This in turn sheds light on the ownership of the product where this lies on the student group. The corresponding company may then in case of success choose to procure the full rights of the project results.

Demola has recently been introduced in what is called Demola South Sweden, involving several participants from academia, companies and other organizations from that region. There are e.g., economy students from Lund university, that together with software developers from Kristianstad university, provide business models and system prototypes for, e.g., Sony Mobile, or Ericsson. Besides from design-build examples, aspects on enterprise are also emphasized, that besides the core of the CDIO syllabus, furthermore meet its extended parts.

This contribution will present how Demola generally may contribute to CDIO based learning. Learning outcomes and CDIO Standards of interest, and how to plug in Demola projects as parts of university courses, will be discussed. Especially, how that may be done in thesis work projects will be covered. Moreover, experiences from Demola projects so far will be presented. Besides from that, the concept of Demola will be further investigated, and experiences from involved stakeholders will also be presented.

KEYWORDS

University-Industry cooperation, project based work, work based learning, Computer Science, multidisciplinary projects, Standards: 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014