Innovation

Distinctive features of the CATIA proposal aimed at creating a higher level of enhanced, systemic, structural and sustainable cooperation between partners are:

  • A sound geographical balance
  • A diverse spectrum of higher education institutions: both small, medium-sized institutions located outside capital cities and large institutions are represented. Most of the partners already had some active collaborations before upscaling their cooperation to the next level. However, in CATIA, already cooperating partners have reached out to new partners, to ensure that – based on new strengths and complementarities – all the competencies needed to achieve the ambitious vision of the project were available within the alliance)
  • Promote joint research among the Alliance members through the creation of an Alliance Grant Office whose role is to encourage the definition of joint research and innovation projects with a challenge-based approach, and seek the most appropriate funding sources. The challenge is to seek excellence in the CAT sector. The Alliance Grant Office will consist of a mixed team, made up of researchers and administrative staff from various universities.
  • Innovative governance models. At the moment the organizational model of CATIA is assumed to be the following:
    • Alliance Strategic Board that include high-level decision makers of the Partners, selected within academic and administrative staff, together with students’ representatives from partner universities (bachelor, master and PhD)
    • Alliance Career and Mobility Office to manage students, professors, researchers and administrative staff mobility, by also exploiting the services available within the ERASMUS + APP
    • Alliance Tech Center, a center for the shared management of all digital resources useful for training and research, such as e-learning platforms, MOOCs created by the Alliance, software tools focused for research and training, Digital Libraries, MOLs assets etc.
    • Alliance Entrepreneurship Center, a center specialized in identifying, designing and launching new entrepreneurial actions starting from research results, from the results of studies and thesis projects conducted within the Alliance, in order to encourage self-entrepreneurship paths started by students and PhDs of the Alliance.
    • Embedded and seamless mobility: put in place more flexible and innovative mobility formats, combining physical, virtual and blended mobility, offering both short-term and long-term opportunities.  This will help to increase social inclusion. Students that were left behind in more traditional mobility schemes, may be included by also working with virtual and mixed mobility schemes. Enhance and promote the European Student Card for automatic recognition of course credits.
    • A virtual software infrastructure will be developed to support the activities of the alliance, both in the educational (EDU-P) and in the research & entrepreneurship (R&E-P) context.

From an Educational perspective the software infrastructure will be focused on:

  • sharing the offered curricula of the Alliance
  • a distributed management of careers
  • provision of student services such as:
    • issuing digital certificates
    • digital archiving of thesis deliverables
    • request for European student card
    • request for mobility and funding

The infrastructure and the student card will be developed starting from and exploiting consolidated experiences of the consortium university (UNIBA). Based on the European student card model, the Alliance card will be a SMART card that will allow to uniquely recognize the student and his home university. It will allow the student to be recognized in all of the Alliance’s affiliated offices and to take advantage of all services and benefits for students. Through QR-code and digital readers, it will be possible, by authorized administrative offices, to query the software’s infrastructure and obtain information on the student’s career and enabled authorizations (e.g. access to MOL).

For what concerns Research and Entrepreneurship, a mapping of the Alliance’s competences will be carried out which will be used through a dedicated portal. It will also be used for matching-making purposes by the Grant Office to identify the most fit research groups to be involved in specific projects, and also for defining and assigning thesis topics in collaboration with universities and businesses.

The implementation of a quintuple helix regional development model based on the creation of 7 Mission Oriented Laboratory and 4 theme-based virtual coordinating structure for creating a tangible “European Space” for growth, in which to collaborate actively at all levels, education, research, entrepreneurship etc.