Promoting innovation playfully: real-world challenges to connect talent and businesses
Collaboration among the public and private sectors is one of the fundamental pillars of economic and social development. At the UAB Research Park, we work with the conviction that the university can be a motor of knowledge transfer and open innovation. This is why one of the most effective ways to bring closer businesses and universities is to solve challenges of collaborative innovation through hackathons and themed competitions promoted by said businesses and/or town and city halls.
These initiatives allow for organizations to raise real-world challenges that require creative and multidisciplinary solutions, opening a space of interaction with the university community and, particularly, with the emerging talent of students.
A generalist University as an ideal environment
The Autonomous University of Barcelona, as a generalist institution, offers a unique ecosystem to promote these collaborations. Its wide array of disciplines favours a cross-cutting and integrative approach to the challenges and promotes inclusion and diversity by bringing together students and researchers of different fields to work together towards a common goal.
This model of collaboration stimulates the creation of innovative solution that answer real-world necessities, with a potential direct impact to society.
Great benefits for businesses and students
For businesses, to take part into this kind of competition represents an opportunity for the following:
- Detect young and creative talent, with the ability and motivation to solve complex problems.
- Discover closely the areas of knowledge and lines of research within the UAB, opening the door for future collaborations with research groups.
- Establish connections with other companies, startups, and researchers in an open innovation environment.
For students, the challenges represent a privileged moment to:
- Face real-world problems in a workplace environment.
- Develop key abilities such as problem-solving, decision-making, creativity, entrepreneurial mentality, prototyping, public communication, the opportunity to make professional contacts, and open world to the work market.
A win-win model to transform the future
Challenge competitions are much more than one-time activities; they are motors of collaborative innovation with tangible results and a great potential for transformation. At the UAB Research Park we create and promote initiatives such as Innovation Days, which has accounted with the participation of 15 companies of different sectors like health, engineering and ICT, and more than 45 students of multiple disciplines working together to offer innovative solutions to real business challenges.
Another highlighted example is the upcoming Hackathon, organized jointly with the ALBA Synchrotron and Cerdanyola del Vallès City Hall, where companies such as Dentaid, Acciona, Applus or Ercross will pose multidisciplinary challenges. More than fifty passionate students and researchers are expected to participate, offering their creative answers and bringing their proposals one step further, with potential to become real innovation projects.
These experiences not only generate useful, applicable solutions, but also consolidate the relationship between the University and businesses, activate the emerging talent, and position the participant organizations as referents in open and collaborative innovation.
Transforming your challenges into opportunities
If you’re part of a business, public entity or organization with a real challenge to solve, from the UAB Research Park we invite you to turn it into a transforming experience. We help you to design a tailored activity, connecting with university talent to face your challenges with creativity, rigour and passion.
Trust us to generate innovative ideas, discover collaborative futures and position your organizations as referents in open innovation. At the UAB Research Park we transform your challenges into winning alliances. When do we start?