The ‘Rewind’ project, international finalist of the competition ‘Peer to Peer: Facebook Global Digital Challenge’
1 July, 2019
The Faculty of Pharmacy of CEU USP takes part in the VI Symposium of Medicinal Chemistry for Young Researchers
3 July, 2019
Universidad CEU San Pablo has hosted a new edition of Innovation Teams, a proposal to boost entrepreneurship willing to be the meeting point of universities and companies.
Five organizations from different sectors have presented real innovation challenges to 22 graduate and postgraduate students at the university centre in Madrid. This time it has been the turn of Iberia, Marco Aldany, Medicsen, Nimgenetics and Calidad Pascual.
The benefits of the educational program based on innovation
The purpose of Innovation Teams is to promote the innovative transformation of ideas from an initial challenge. The intention is to provide value to students thanks to academic monitoring and training by the participating companies.
Therefore throughout these three months, students undergo a process of “learning by doing” through different training and mentoring sessions and sessions at the companies. In these meetings entities have validated the progress according to three variables: research, better value and minimum feasible product. Methodologies Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Service Design have also been applied.
These are some of the advantages of this program:
- Promotes entrepreneurship among students.
- Boosts training of multidisciplinary groups as they are students of the degree on Communication, Biotechnology, Pharmacy and postgraduates of International Management and Biotechnological Companies.
- Encourages entrepreneurship within companies.
- Fosters the creation of innovative projects.
- Favours the rapprochement of participants and the labour market.
- Eases the knowledge of innovation methodologies.
An alliance between universities and companies
Professors expert in the areas of each challenge have provided support to the groups, integrating in the different work teams. This year’s edition of Innovation Teams has ended with a public presentation of the projects before the companies proposing the challenges.
In the closing ceremony, the Director of Innovation EY, Mario Carabaño gave the speech “Innovation: beyond technology”.
Afterwards there was a debate in a round table titled “Open Innovation as R&D strategy” with Carlos Lozano, Managing Director of the consultancy BICG as moderator. It counted with the presence of the Director of International Business of Grupo Alma, Javier Pelayo; the Director of Communication and HHRR of Nimgenetics, Miguel del Cerro; the Director of Innovation of Iberia, Ignacio Tovar; the COO of MedicSen, César Mercado and the Director of Innovation of Abierta Calidad Pascual, Sejal Rajvi. The discussion analysed the idea of open innovation and presented the challenges they have to face. They also discussed to which extent companies have included this concept in their R&D strategy and who form the open innovation community of each organization.
