•Notícia

The Barcelona School of Telecommunications Engineering of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), the ESADE Business and Law School and the European Design Institute (IED) were selected to participate in Challenge Based Innovation (CBI), an international collaborative project with CERN, the world's leading centre for particle physics. The project's purpose is to carry out research into new solutions for the future of humanity. The initiative aims to bring society and science closer by fostering an experimental training programme on disruptive innovation for students from all over the world.

Following two weeks of learning with scientists at CERN's facilities in Geneva, 18 students from the three institutions are currently working with students from universities in Italy, Norway, Finland and Australia. The aim of the participants is to create products and services that solve problems for contemporary society and then present them to the CERN community in Switzerland in February 2015.

The students from ESADE, IED and the UPC's ETSETB are facing four challenges: to reduce food waste worldwide, to invent a feasible system that allows people with physical disabilities to improve their natural mobility, to design a system that provides information on the effects of interaction between people and to create a customised service that a sense of well-being and safety by combining data from the environment and human behaviour.

The CBI project gives students the opportunity to use the technology at CERN, a world-renowned developer of new technologies. Participants will have a unique experience during the final, prototyping stage of each project, during which they will be working with scientists from the organisation and learning about their particular area of knowledge.

Following the initial two-week training period in CERN's IdeaSquare centre, the teams are currently working on-site in Barcelona and online, and are being tutored by the seven universities. It is an example of co-creation and collaboration between disciplines to which ESADE contributes its expertise in management, IED in design, and the UPC in engineering. From the outset of the project, students have followed innovation methodologies such as design thinking and have thus been able to contribute the perspectives of their specialisation.

The participation of the three higher education institutions in this global initiative shows their commitment to innovation economics through promoting an international, collaborative approach to solving society's present and future problems. It also serves to strengthen Barcelona's position as a city that is known worldwide for its creative and multidisciplinary spirit.