Develop an innovative startup concept that solves a real-world problem! You will work in small teams to design entrepreneurial solutions integrating technological feasibility, sustainable business models, and active stakeholder engagement. This open-ended micro-module gives you the opportunity to explore pressing issues such as climate resilience, the circular economy, health technology, mobility, and digital inclusion, and to translate your ideas (for example from former ECIU Challenges) into actionable business concepts. The micro-module is a collaboration between Hamburg University of Technology, University of Twente and University of Stavanger as an associated partner.

Expected impact:

The concepts developed during the micro-module may serve as the foundation for real ventures in the future, either within or beyond the university ecosystem.

Additionally, the module empowers students to:

- Apply entrepreneurial methods in a real-world context

- Gain critical insights into the startup lifecycle, from ideation to go-to-market

- Build collaboration, leadership, and innovation capabilities

- Understand the challenges of technology transfer and commercialization

Participants will walk away with a toolkit of entrepreneurial skills and mindsets applicable across sectors and disciplines, giving them the confidence to take initiative in complex, uncertain environments.

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.

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

Hamburg University of Technology

Innovation to Impact: Empowering Startups to Solve Real-World Problems

Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship with a Focus on Technological Innovation

Entrepreneurship, technology and innovation

Critical and innovative thinking

Inter-personal skills

Media and information literacy

Intra-personal skills

This course aims to help you develop your understanding of sustainability thinking in education and its role in societal development towards more sustainable futures. It emphasizes the normative and value-based challenges of educational approaches to sustainable development.

The course introduces the interconnectedness of the Earth's systems, both locally and globally, in relation to socio-economic structures. Sustainability challenges and the role of education in sustainable practices will be explored.

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

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

University of Stavanger

Sustainability thinking in education

Resilient communities

Energy and sustainability

Circular economy

Global citizenship

Challenges to one’s life and living can be disturbing as they raise questions of what it means for one to be human. 

To take on another’s or one’s own challenges requires traits and skills. 

This course enables professionals of human care to jointly explore issues of life and death, illness and wellness, freedom and responsibility, relation and isolation, meaning and meaninglessness, worth and unworthiness, happiness and misery, by training multiple skills and traits for existential and ethical dialogues.

So, we join the conversation of Wisdom and Prudence in Francesco Rustici’s painting above.

Painting titled Wisdom and Prudence by Francesco Rustici

Existential and Ethical Dialogues

Enquiring Life-Issues Together

Ten years after the Brexit referendum, the world is an uncertain and divisive era, and politics is becoming more deeply polarising than ever before. 

We experience communication bubbles and practices, often delegitimizing political and social opponents. There is a growing need to adjust to such political and social conditions regardless of political affiliation. Hence, the course offers you the opportunity to develop their negotiating skills in deep political polarisation.   

Negotiation models usually assume rational exchanges of arguments based on the interests of the involved parties. It can be in the form of game theory or deliberative democratic models. Polarization brings new conditions for political, social, and economic negotiations, where there is very little common ground, deep opposing interests, and an emphasis on emotional arguments that provide immediate political agency.    

The traditional class format often struggles to keep pace with a rapidly changing political and social environment. Hence, this module offers a board game as an active learning experience for you to enhance your educational and social skills in the context of growing political polarisation.  

Following the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum, the micromodule will use the ‘How to Win Brexit?’ educational board game to deliver its aims and learning outcomes. It is a dynamic, role-playing, strategic political board game designed for anyone passionate about politics, negotiations, leadership, and decision-making. 

The course will allow you to self-reflect on Brexit itself, but also extrapolate this experience into other political scenarios that involve deep polarisation - like Trump-era trade, political or climate change negotiations.  

The game is professionally produced, featuring engaging elements such as cards, boards, tokens, and 3D figures of Brexit-era politicians.    

No prior expertise in Brexit or politics is required. You will be provided with meticulously crafted materials to navigate the negotiations.

Negotiating Politics in Deep Polarization

For a century, writers have used playful, experimental, and game-based methods for thinking about literature. 

Recent interest in game-based teaching has opened the door to bring these methods into the classroom.

In this course, we will study these creative reading and writing games and then build our own! The games can be either digital or tabletop, so no expertise is required.

Illustration photo of protoype of tabletop game

Design and Play Educational Creative Writing Games!

Practical Challenge Designing Educational Creative Writing Games

Intercultural skills have been recognized as the top-valued skills for not only employers in various industries but for education from the earliest age. Multilingualism goes hand in hand with intercultural competencies, and is already a stated goal for EU-education and a need in increasingly diverse working and living contexts. Therefore, the aim of the course is to explore and critically evaluate the key issues in research on intercultural competence and multilingualism, especially from the standpoint of teacher education and foreign language teaching, by working with a range of art-based research techniques.

Art-based Research Methods in Intercultural Competence and Multilingualism

Exploring, analyzing, and using various research methods

This study module aims at enhancing cultural awareness as a key skill in Early Childhood setting.

Globalization has the last decades turned national and local communities into migrant societies. ECEC is an institution in which children, guardians, parents, and staff from various backgrounds and with multiple belongings meet. This gives ECEC a key role in creating inclusion and belonging in dynamic communities influenced by local and global concerns.

The course will enrich students' knowledge and skills for leading and guiding processes of creating belonging in children's groups, cooperating with a diverse group of parents/guardians. Finding practical, enjoyable, and efficient ways of working as professional staff requires high level of intercultural competence.

Critical Cultural Awareness in Migration societies

Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

This micro-module examines the ways in which digital technologies and media shape individual identities, social structures, and cultural practices. 

It highlights both the formative influence of digital environments on mindsets and opinions, and their creative affordances. 

Through hands-on engagement and the role of producer rather than consumer, participants develop practical insights and a deeper critical understanding of society as well as their own positioning within it.

a man sitting at a desk with a computer and headphones

Creative Hearts and Digital Minds

Media Literacy and building Resilience in a Digital World

In this micro-module, you are challenged to design an educational escape room that teaches the core principles of Challenge-Based Learning (CBL): Engage, Investigate, and Act. The escape room will serve as a hands-on tool for educators seeking to implement CBL effectively in their own classrooms.

Design an Educational Escape Room

An educational escape room designed to teach the core principles of Challenge-Based Learning (CBL)

From reimagining urban mobility to better mealtime experiences in nursing homes and greener university campuses, today’s sustainability challenges are multifaceted, spanning technological, social, and environmental dimensions. Responding to these requires not only technical solutions but also human-centered and context-sensitive approaches. 

This course aims to empower students to become change agents through Challenge-Based Learning. Working collaboratively in an international and multidisciplinary setting, you will engage with a real-world sustainability challenge and co-create solutions that are responsive to people’s everyday routines and the specific needs of their contexts. 

Throughout this process, you will contribute to shaping more sustainable futures while developing key competencies in collaboration, systems thinking, and service innovation.

Smart & Green

Co-creating Sustainability for People & Places

Societies across the globe are in dire need to decarbonize their energy systems and to switch to renewable energy production, a transformation generally known as the green transition. 

Whereas the motivation for this energy transition is particular – anthropogenic climate change – the transition from one energy source to another is not unique. Throughout history, societies have harvested different energies and transitioned from one energy carrier and system to another, such as from organic to fossil materials. 

In five thematic modules, you will learn about energy transitions through the lens of energy history and their wider implications for nature, societies, and cultures. You will explore energy transitions as a concept and as a political, social, and environmental reality. And you will learn about the importance of studying energy and energy transitions in history.  

This course will teach you that energy transitions not only are technological but also societal and cultural transformations. As such, Histories of Energy Transitions will be valuable for anyone from sciences, technology, engineering, humanities, education, and arts who are interested in energy issues.

Black transmission towers under green sky

Histories of Energy Transitions

Simulation in health care education is a learner-centred approach to enhance the transition of theory to practice and to prepare students for work life. The facilitator role is essential to promote reflection, especially in the debrief.  

In this course, you practice the facilitator role and learn to apply this pedagogical strategy to take ownership and create your own learning pathways through problem-solving techniques. Additionally, the module employs the Challenge-Based Learning (CBL framework). The CBL framework facilitates learning through engagement in relevant real-world issues.  

**What is SimBegin?**

A facilitator course, level one, where you will learn to independently run simulation training through practical challenges and reflective thinking. The tool CORE is used to structure the simulation training.

Two women simulating a health scenario with a baby

SimBegin® – facilitator course to run student-led simulation training in health care education

Learn to run simulation training with premade scenarios and practical challenges.

This challenge addresses an often-neglected dimension of diversity and inclusion which is ‘age’, particularly ‘minor age’. Adultcentric bias can create barriers in recognizing the capacities of children and youth to contribute to society as they can be pre-judged to be ‘incompetent’ or ‘not-yet developed’ due to their age.

Raising critical self-awareness of adultcentrism among adults in educational contexts can support them to develop more age-inclusive attitudes towards children and youth in daily life. However, this process of raising critical self-awareness related to one’s own adult age can bring up emotional responses e.g., fear, guilt, insecurity, denial etc. that can create obstacles in the learning process of adults and might worsen intergenerational differences.

The central challenge in this course is to implement a game to be used by adults to raise the awareness of the psychological concept of ‘adultcentrism’ among adults in educational relationships with children and youth. A key ethical question in developing a game for this purpose is whether the design of such a game is age-sensitive towards adult learners.

Illustration of a person in different stages of life

Game the bias: Adultcentrism in Educational Relationships

This challenge asks you to propose future solutions that could help historians write about child and youth contributions to the early 21st-century climate movement. 

Although children and youth play important roles in social change, their voices and age remain marginal in most historical research. The difficulty often lies in the limited access to sources about and created by children and youth.

You will therefore engage, investigate, and propose ideas for how future historians could better capture these contributions and forms of activism.

Illustration of child at a climate strike

Childism and Archiving the Climate Movement

Ultrasound is rapidly becoming an essential tool across a wide range of clinical disciplines—not just radiology. 

For Healthcare professionals such as physicians, nurses and paramedics, point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) enables faster diagnostic assessments, enhances patient safety, and supports more informed clinical decision-making at the bedside. 

This micro-module offers a concise and practical introduction to the fundamental principles and applications of ultrasound in everyday clinical practice. It is the first step toward integrating ultrasound into your clinical skill set—empowering you to deliver safer, more efficient, and evidence-based care.

Illustration showing a person using ultrasound on a patient

Introduction to the Use of Ultrasound for Healthcare Professionals

Empowering Clinical Practice with Point-of-Care Ultrasound

In the theme of stress theory, key mechanisms in the theory will be highlighted. Furthermore, attention will be drawn to how we can understand, manage, and cope with stress related to working with challenging behavior, both among students/children and staff. 

Theory and research on the brain's functioning and structure will be addressed. Understanding the brain's structure and functioning will be emphasized to create a connection between theory and practice concerning the condition-dependent functioning of children and staff. 

Theories on stress and brain functioning will be interconnected to establish a deeper understanding of the behavior of children, youth, and staff.

How do we understand challenging behavior?

Stress and regulation - new perspectives on inclusion

This micromodule introduces you to autoethnography and post-qualitative research methodologies, emphasizing personal experience, reflexivity, and critical inquiry beyond traditional qualitative frameworks. 

Autoethnography invites researchers to systematically explore personal experiences and narratives to reflect broader social, political, and cultural contexts. 

Post-qualitative approaches challenge conventional qualitative research paradigms by challenging notions such as ‘data collection’ while emphasizing ethical complexity, relationality, and emergent understandings.

Beyond Self: Autoethnography and Post-Qualitative Research

How can communication in educational settings give all children opportunities to participate creatively? This micro-module explores how educators in settings characterized by diversity can facilitate inclusive communication guided by democratic values.  In this course we will focus on possibilities and dilemmas in professional development in educational settings – primarily early childhood education.

Cultural sensitivity, creativity and communication in Early Childhood Education and Care

How to facilitate inclusive communcation guided by democratic values

### **Our 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.

### Expected Impact

The participants will develop cross-cutting and transdisciplinary knowledge in reproductive health lifestyle. Regarding the skills developed by the students, it can be listed:  
-Cross-cutting skills, such as communication abilities, language competencies, critical thinking, problem-solving, intercultural competencies, and research capabilities;  
-Future-oriented competencies that will enable participants to face the challenges they will encounter in their professional lives;  
-Personal development, such as the ability to adapt to new situations and self-confidence.  
  
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 Stavanger

Member university

University of Stavanger

Learning opportunities of University of Stavanger