The challenge is to find innovative, creative and at the same time feasible solutions to realize sustainable mobility connections and enhance the biodiversity of the urban ecosystem.  
  
In the city of Trento, an area in which the natural and anthropic environment contrast and merge, a new and exciting phase of change is opening up in the area of mobility. Within this framework, it is necessary to support people in overcoming geographical, orographic differences, addressing environmental, social and economic objectives.

Member universities may require additional information from applicants. Please read the application information section carefully and include any extra required information in this section.

Other

CV (Curriculum Vitae) is a document that summarizes your educational and professional history. It must provide a detailed overview of your academic and work experience, skills, achievements, and qualifications.

Transcript of Records is an official document issued by your home university. It specifies the name of the institution, the academic programme you are enrolled in, the list of courses taken up until the current period, the exams or tests you passed, the grades and the credits you earned. 

Transcript of Records

Motivation letter is a personal statement and it might include a brief introduction of yourself, explanation why are you interested in the learning opportunity you are applying to, any relevant experience or skills that you have, your goals and how this opportunity will help you achieve them, This document should not be more than 400 words.

Motivation Letter

University of Trento

From Peaks to Pavement

Transforming Mobility in Hilly Areas of Trento with Sustainable Solutions focusing on Urban Biodiversity

Energy and sustainability

Transport and Mobility

As each challenge has its own specificities, the course develops its content organically, and different teams might be exposed to different pieces of content. Common topics nonetheless include business analysis methodologies (e.g., SWOT analysis, PESTLE analysis, scenario back-casting, …), business research methods basics (e.g., inductive research design, designing broad semi-structured interviews, designing surveys, …), use of data banks (e.g., Statista, Our World In Data, World Bank, Eurostat, …), and more.  
Suitable topics for business challenges might include market / business environment analysis (main forces affecting the business, suppliers, partners, competition, environmental issues), sustainability and social issues, business modelling, go-to-market strategies, and more.  
All challenges are sourced either from the EIT Digital Innovation Action Lines (within Activities, Partners / Business Community projects) or are collected by the course’s teachers in the university ecosystem.

I&E Studies

Entrepreneurship, technology and innovation

Critical and innovative thinking

Innovation is a high-risk process. To understand and manage opportunities and risks characterising innovation processes, it is important to understand how innovation emerges and why across the industry boundering supporting innovation processes. Applying an ecosystemic approach to innovation helps to reduce costs and increase novelty. However, new approaches are needed to handle complexity. This is particularly important to design effective strategies to solve challenges related to both business and society.

SOI-058 Innovation Ecosystems

Inter-personal skills

“If you can’t describe your business model in ten words or fewer, you don’t have a business model.” – Guy Kawasaki

“Whatever it is, every idea you present must be something you could get across easily at a cocktail party with strangers. If only aficionados of your industry can understand what you're saying, you've blown it.” – Jack Welch

“You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.”–  Lee Iacocca

Communicating Innovation

Intra-personal skills

The challenge aims to find sustainability and green economy solutions using the technology of photobioreactors (PBRs). The students will try to solve the challenge by using techniques drawn from future studies. 

Since PBRs are versatile technologies, learners will go through two divergent phases: on the first, learners will decide what field of application (commercial sector, or segment of industry) they want to explore for PBRs; on the second, learners will use scenarios to explore how their chosen application field could evolve in a medium-term future. In practice, the scenarios that students produce will be descriptions of hypothetical worlds where PBRs have different roles and prominences in the respective fields of application. Once learners decide on a scenario, they will close the challenge by proposing a concept for a product that ALOS could develop within that scenario. 

The students will learn to assess the potential of a technology critically, and use tools of thought to experience a less classic way of doing entrepreneurship in the field of Innovation and Technology, orienting it to responsible innovation and sustainability.

Back to the Future

As a graduate student, pitching yourself in the hope to obtain a job opportunity can be very hard: lack of confidence can creep in, compromising the outcome of your efforts. This course will teach how to present yourself with confidence, providing you with the right tools to communicate effectively and go from frustration to pride in your job search.  

Here’s an overview of the content:

- How to create a great in-person first impression

- The structure of a winning cover letter

- Interviews structure and preparation technique

SOI-092 Pitch Yourself

It is commonly agreed today that companies’ purpose should not only be to generate profits but also to contribute to a sustainable development that protects the environment and generates some level of positive social impact for their stakeholders and the societies they operate in.

During this course, we will explore how companies, investors and society can make this happen by promoting, measuring and reporting their performance and levels of impact, preventing practices such as greenwashing and responding to criticism, sometimes partly justified, of it lacking substance or being at the origin of the next investment bubble.

Social Impact Investing

The TRent is an institutional portal created by Opera Universitaria in 2021 to support students in the delicate phase of choosing accommodation, facilitating the meeting of students and property owners, and the demand and supply of housing in Trento and Rovereto. It's a sort of virtual bulletin board that presents a diverse, updated offer of housing solutions with clear and detailed information. At the same time, it gives property owners the opportunity to showcase their offerings in a modern, intuitive, and easy-to-navigate "storefront," available in both Italian and English.

Opera Universitaria oversees the correct use of the portal through a sample check of the data entered during registration, as well as all the information that is added. It also verifies that the announced property actually corresponds to an address and has the described amenities. This check is exclusively done for ads placed by private owners, who are marked with the OU stamp.

PORTAL STATISTICS

Approximately 3,000 registered students, 160 landlords with their own properties (private owners, property managers, intermediaries, university colleges), about a hundred accommodations listed, 150 available accommodations, and around 19,000 users who, in the last 6 months alone, have interacted with the portal, mainly from Italy but also from Spain, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Brazil.

CHALLENGE GOALS:

The primary goal is to elevate awareness of TRent among students and fortify its presence in the accommodation search realm. Simultaneously, a key objective should be to augment the student enrollment figures and work towards expanding the platform array of listings.

Trento Housing Community

Resilient communities

One of the primary objectives of this module is to shift the narrative from the conventional understanding of creativity as an individual endeavor to a more nuanced perspective that recognizes the power and potential of collaborative efforts. By doing so, participants will develop a profound understanding of how group dynamics, team interactions, and shared perspectives contribute to the emergence of innovative ideas and solutions.

Content summary:

- Introduction to the creative process
- Team and collective creativity
- Organisational mechanisms to support collective creativity
- Leading for creativity

Creativity and Collective Creativity in Organizations

The future of international cooperation relies on developing new forms of active involvement of EU citizens and institutions, as much as methods that allow communities to innovate their socio-technical approach to resources and their overall distribution. Specifically, the global economic situation and the evolution of the geopolitical arena stimulate small and medium organizations to situate themselves differently than in the past, both in terms of external accountability and internal goal-setting. These changes are also facing our challenge provider Mazingira.org, a small NGO working on environmental protection and social inclusion in Italia and Tanzania. After a long experience in the implementation of SDGs with participatory and community activities, Mazingira is searching for innovative ways to involve citizens and institutions and has given us the spring for this challenge. In accordance with this view, our participants will discuss the aims of international cooperation with the support of experts and teamchers, and explore the topic adopting a future-oriented and culturally-informed perspective.

Engaging with the Future

Do you believe that technologies are automatically transforming our cities into ‘smart’ ones? 

The objective of this challenge is to leverage open data and develop creative and practical citizen-centric services. Cities are generally not able to give an effective answer to the differentiated set of citizens' needs, and to serve on demand. Students should identify how data-driven services can have a positive impact in different areas of application, such as transportation, public safety, health and well-being, education, or community engagement. To this end, they should be able to deal with data in terms of access, integration, analysis and visualization with the ultimate goal of extracting relevant knowledge by exploiting proper data science tools. Students will explore how to address the needs and preferences of the residents of the Autonomous Province of Trento (PAT) while enhancing their quality of life through open data-driven solutions.

CaaS: Build the City You Need

This course simulates real challenges in order to teach students two different methodologies to deliver meaningful solutions to challenge providers. In the challenge approach, understanding the problem is often considered half the way to its solution. Students are stimulated to gather information in creative ways, focusing on the problem without jumping to solutions. They will then pass on to the next phase (i.e. idea generation) once the problem, the stakeholder, the challenge and the methodology have been exhaustively analyzed.

We then take the opposite view and students are instructed to be concrete and effective in the generation of meaningful ideas and projects for the challenge provider.

We will also stress the importance of the final implementation of a sound action plan based on the information gathered in the first phase. Students will develop fields of play, or scenarios, where innovation is more likely to happen.

SOI-070 Challenge Action Plan

This course provides an overview of Data Governance in terms of terminology, frameworks, processes, roles, and tools to put in place an effective data governance strategy and operating model.

The role of data quality and data protection in data governance will be also presented jointly with the importance of a data culture within a company or organization. During the course, several case studies will be presented to provide concrete examples of the different aspects of data governance from the business and innovation world.

SOI-093 Data Governance

Media and information literacy

Whether in your studies, a real-life (ECIU) challenge or in your future career, the need to develop your intercultural competences and become able to work with anyone and anywhere in the world is becoming more and more important. Being connected with other countries and other cultures can provide you with wonderful opportunities for collaboration and new and refreshing insights. To accommodate such creative collaboration, it is important to make sure you have the right tools for effective teamwork in multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary groups. With this course, you will gain practical insights into intercultural competences by creating your own Citizen Science project! During this micro-module, you will learn to better understand and work within diverse groups, how to improve on your communicative skills and create an effective team, and how you can apply and present your solutions in a broad variety of contexts. 

For more information and the latest updates, check out [https://www.utwente.nl/en/intercultural-competences/](https://www.utwente.nl/en/intercultural-competences/)

University of Twente

Intercultural Competences

Guiding practical insights through Citizen Science

Global citizenship

## The Challenge

Learners will work together to acquire skills and competencies related to the physiopathological basis of the reproductive system, infertility, and influence of lifestyle on reproductive health. The ultimate goal is to integrate and apply this knowledge in identifying and solving real problems in the area through the implementation of multicultural working groups. During this challenge, priority will be given to innovative and experimental teaching models, such as challenge-based in a blended learning approach that combines virtual and face-to-face mobility

## Impact

The participants will develop cross-cutting and transdisciplinary knowledge in reproductive health lifestyle. This challenge will also promote new forms of international mobility that allow an increase in the number of individuals with an international mobility experience in higher education, while also promoting collaborative and cooperative work skills through the experience of active teaching and learning methodologies. This intensive blended program is aligned with the strategic development plan of the Department of Medical Sciences, within the scope of its internationalization policy, as well as with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, namely for Good Health and Well-being (Goal 3), Quality Education (Goal 4), Gender Equality (Goal 5), and Reduced Inequalities (Goal 10).

Member university

University of Trento

Member university

University of Trento