A team of students from the University of Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology, and the Erasmus University of Rotterdam have worked together to unleash the potential of ATTRACT technologies in new ways.
Romy Welschen, Dap Hartmann, and Sem Carree, entrepreneurship and design thinking experts from the Delft University of Technology, recently took on the challenge to develop a course hosted at CERN’s IdeaSquare, in which students examined the potential value of ATTRACT’s breakthrough technologies and translated them into new applications for society.
The first edition took place last year in 2019 with TU Delft engineering students. This year the course was altered to fit an online format, in line with TU Delft’s Covid-19 health measures. For the second edition, the course was also opened up to business and finance students from the Rotterdam School of Management and students from the University of Amsterdam with backgrounds in exact sciences.
“This course was launched in June 2019 and it will last as long as IdeaSquare extends its invitation to the following years. We enjoy this innovative form of teaching very much and find it important to continue supporting multidisciplinary teams to unleash the potential value of ATTRACT technologies for society” – Teaching team (Dap, Sem, and Romy)
The students’ mission for this course was making a prototype, a pitch, and writing a paper about their innovation process for CERN’s IdeaSquare journal on experimental innovation.
The students went through an ideation phase where they came up with many new applications, after which they converged to the 3 most promising ones, and then interviewed stakeholders to determine the final application, which was evaluated on the desirability, feasibility, and viability.
“We’ve never seen a place where the differences among people are celebrated so much and are undeniably turned into strengths. We perceive IdeaSquare’s culture to test limits and its interaction with people working at CERN to be a vital ingredient for our ideation process” – Teaching team
According to the course coordinators, IdeaSquare was crucial for this experience to unleash the potential of ATTRACT technologies: “Besides hosting the course and lending crew time to help instruct the students, IdeaSquare is so experienced in teaching multidisciplinary teams with different cultural backgrounds that they really knew how to teach the students the value of diversity within teams like no other.”
