Implementation of West Transdanubian Action Plan has a good progress and tangible results with the coordination of Pannon Novum in close cooperation with main regional stakeholders among them Ministry for Finance, Szechenyi Istvan University and Technics Playground 4.0 Mechatronics and Training Centre. Estimated amount of influenced ERDF so far is nearly half a million euros.
The Action Plan is covering a broad bandwidth of actions with the aim of direct commercialisation of R&D results and development of an innovation-oriented society as precondition. Two actions are dealing with strengthening the collaboration between public RTO/HEI and private businesses: Supporting the university-industry collaboration and innovation vouchers.
Szechenyi Istvan University of Gyoer has launched innovation consulting projects with university teams where the participants are active, come up with lots of ideas and formulate concrete proposals and product development for the problems of the partner companies. From 2019, this activity was started by building into university courses. The success of this type of activity is proved by international examples, such as the Demola program of the University of Tampere in Finland, which has been successful for almost 10 years and is used in dozens of countries.
The principle of so called “Student Innovation Projects” is that teams of 3-5 students from different disciplines work together on development tasks set by partner companies, local municipalities and social institutions with the help of mentor trainers, which provides significant added value for participating companies as well as students and mentor trainers. The teams have three months of intensive work, the main goal is to elaborate and present a summary study to a jury of corporate partners, summarizing the problem, the research activities and the package of proposals needed for the solution. So far 17 different companies, 22 mentors and about 100 students have participated in the 22 innovation consulting projects. The digital switchover of the Student and Innovation Project and the proposal for industrial cooperation are good examples of how higher education can adapt to the changed circumstances.
3rd Action “Working with schools and students” enables to get insight into the technological world for scholar groups just in two hours or half a day workshops and in order to create, learn playfully, discover and experiment the robot technology and digital devices in an inspiring environment provided by Technics Playground 4.0 Robotics and Training Centre in Gyoer. Exhibition area was opend at the Training Centre in order to bring closer the achievements of science and technology to scholars and regional citizens.
4th Action “Integration of INNOVATION PROFILING into the regional innovation supporting system of West Transdanubia” is aiming at supporting low/medium innovative companies to increase their innovation capacity and mapping potential new customers for the R&D+I funding scheme. Training workshop was organized for the stakeholders how could be transferred and applied the tool of Innovation Profiling from Lower Austria to Hungarian region.
