Open Innovation Laboratory: Education 4.0 Environments to improve competences in scholars

Abstract

With the widespread adoption of emergent technologies, productive sectors have evolved in leaps and bounds This has generated a breach between what is needed in the Industry and what is expected in Academia to be taught. Traditional education focuses on the development of hard skills in students, nonetheless, current technology developments mainly in the fields of artificial intelligence and automation pose a threat to technique and repetitive jobs. Soft skills on the other hand are to remain active and desired in the near future as they are needed for tasks that machines cannot replicate yet. Complex problems require the integration of multidisciplinary teams where decision making and communication abilities are enhanced by its individual parts. Mass adoption of Information and Communication Technologies in every sector of society demands an evolution of the education model. Consequently, universities throughout lecturers and infrastructure must develop guidelines for students to improve their skills and generate the competences needed. The open innovation concept has bringed institutions a framework to develop multidisciplinary and multi entity projects to provide valuable experiences and competencies development to college students. This has led to the development of Open Innovation Laboratories where learning techniques, design methodologies and product realisation platforms fuse to provide a state-of-the-art concept to cope with the demands toward the educational model. This allows joint efforts from industry, government and institutions on the creation of collaborative projects to provide innovative solutions whilst enriching experience and boosting competences in students. Thus, the idea of gathering emergent technologies for training, open innovation for generating end-to-end solutions and methodologies to foster strengths in students becomes an educational environment to promote the use of active and collaborative learning techniques to enhance soft skills and development of competences facing society challenges as part of the education 4.0 context.