Creative Lab

WHAT IS IT?

The Creative Lab is a highly practical hands-on experience meant to promote the exchange of ideas between Phd students and young researchers with the spirit of creating a new business culture. For the whole duration of the school, participants are going to develop innovative ideas and projects. The main purpose of this event is to foster knowledge transfer among institutions, since each student come with his/her own previous background, as well as to allow the practical application of knowledge derived from lectures and tutorials given during the school, in order to develop organizational, team-work and communication skills and to encourage entrepreneurial thinking.

HOW IT WORKS

On Tuesday morning, the Creative Lab will be introduced by the Director of the school to the participants, which will be organized into small and heterogeneous teams (for nationality and skills). To every team will be assigned a scientific shepherd, to guide them in the design and development of the idea, and an industrial coach, to guide them to define its exploitable impact on the market. Given a starting topic, every team has the mission of designing and developing an innovative idea for CPSs in the future everyday life.

During the week, team members will have the opportunity to interact among themselves and with speakers and other attendees to the school, to make their ideas sprout up.

On Friday, teams will work independently, each team will have the possibility of interacting with the scientific shepherd and the industrial coach assigned them to finalize their ideas, and to prepare the final presentation. The nature of working result is up to the team, it could be a proper prototype, as well as just an idea accompanied by a well-reasoned state of the art. It is important to define for each idea a clear path to implementation, in the form of Gantt. In every case, the working teams need to define the:

  • Context of the idea (and its subcomponents), clearly outlining the competences and the studies needed to develop it.
  • Impact on the market sector(s) of the idea (and its subcomponents)

At the end of the day, teams will present their work projects in front of the plenary summer school audience in order to receive formative feedbacks from fellow students and academic and industrial experts. Team members will be free, of course, in the way they choose to present their projects, e.g., with the support of slides, videos, etc.

Panel of experts that will evaluate the projects’ students:
  • Alberto Secondi (Abinsula)
  • Eduardo de la Torre (UPM)
  • Federica Sechi (Abinsula)
  • Michael Masin (IBM)
  • Note: Participants attending the Creative Lab successfully will obtain a certificate of attendance that could be used for credits in their own PhD School (if PhD school recognize them).