The European Commission is providing € 1 million in assistance to Ukraine to help promoting IT students’ innovation and entrepreneurship at national level over a period of three years. This support is provided through a Structural Measures project under TEMPUS Fifth call.
The overall objectives of this project named “National Education Framework for Enhancing IT Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship” are to promote the synergy between academic programs, research expertise and businesses innovation in Ukraine. This will be achieved by instantiation of the knowledge triangle with emphasis on a student-centered structure based on innovation and entrepreneurship. Some more specific goals of the project are to develop a virtual innovative space based on social technologies to maintain contacts and enable knowledge transfer between all actors, to influence the national standard for IT education in Ukraine and to develop and deliver new courses on IT innovation and entrepreneurship. These objectives, exciting as well as defying, received excellent feedback from the reviewers: ”The project objectives are very challenging indeed, but given the planning that has gone into the project and the clarity of its work packages, there is every confidence that this project will be highly successful.”
This project is coordinated by Linnaeus University (Sweden). This project includes seven partners in Ukraine: Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics, Lviv Polytechnic National University, Odessa National Politechnic University, Ivano-Frankivsk National Technical University of Oil and Gas, Vinnytsia National Technical University, Ministry of Education and Science, Youth and Sport in Ukraine and Yuzhnoye State Design Office. From the rest of EU it includes following partners: Dublin City University (Ireland), Oxford Brooks University (UK), Pedro Nunes Instiutute (Portugal), IKEA (Sweden) and SIGMA Kudos (Sweden). Also IBM has supported strongly this application but due to legal reasons they are not full partners in this project proposal. The reviewers of this proposal also mentioned the quality of the consortium as one of the strength of the project: “The partnership includes an impressive list of institutions and enterprises. In EU these include staff from universities in UK, Ireland, Portugal and Sweden, each one of them bringing high quality expertise to the project. In addition there is participation from two high-profile Swedish multinational enterprises with a proven track record in innovation and Information Technology.”
The project has started on October 15, 2012 and will continue until October 14, 2015. The kickoff meeting of this project is planned for November 5-7, 2012 at Kiev in the Ministry of Science and Education, Youth and Sport in Ukraine.
More information
General Project Manager: Dr. Arianit Kurti, Associate Professor at Linnaeus University, e-mail arianit.kurti@lnu.se, phone +46 (0) 470-70 83 75.
Project Coordinator in Ukraine: Dr. Tetyana Shatovska, Associate Professor at Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics, e-mail: shatovska@gmail.com, phone 0038 057 7021646
Background
Tempus is the European Union’s programme which supports the modernization of higher education in the partner countries of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Western Balkans and the Mediterranean region, mainly through university cooperation projects.
More about Tempus: http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/tempus/programme/about_tempus_en.php