First in-person meeting of the European project CEETNOVA at the UAB
The universities of Norway, Lithuania, Spain, Italy and Sweden met at the UAB to promote the valorisation of knowledge in higher education. All project partners form part of the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU), a network committed to innovation in higher education and research.
From 10 to 12 April the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) held the first in-person meeting of the European project CEETNOVA, an initiative that aims to promote the valorisation of knowledge by training knowledge ambassadors at universities.
During those three days, participants combined strategic work sessions with co-creation workshops to define the structure of the future training programme in knowledge valorisation. They also learned in detail about the challenge-based learning taking place at the UAB and visited several innovation areas on campus such as the Digital Lab, Design Lab and CircuLab.
One of the central points of the meeting was the analysis of a survey conducted among members of the consortium’s institutions. With 125 answers from different European countries, the study pinpointed the current skills and training needs of three key groups: early stage researchers, consolidated academics and non-academic support personnel.
Among the most outstanding areas needing improvement were intellectual property management, business skills, open science, scientific communication and transfer of knowledge. In addition, all groups coincided with the need to reinforce skills such as leadership, diplomacy, artificial intelligence and the valorisation of intellectual assets.
With this data, CEETNOVA begins a new phase focused on the creation of practical training modules that are adapted to each profile. This task will form part of the ECIU’s Work Packet 3 (WP3), which will define both basic and specialised contents for each target group. The first versions of the modules will be validated through a pilot plan in the coming months.