erasmus – Progress in Research

AMBITION: supporting education of young professionals across Europe and Africa

Posted on 05/12/202206/08/2024 by Erik Franco

The Politecnico di Milano has been awarded an Erasmus+ grant to develop the project AMBITION. The project will last until mid-2025 and has been funded with 400.000 euros.

The Erasmus+ AMBITION – AMBassadors for sustainable transITION’s will support the education of a future generation of qualified young professionals trained across Europe and Africa, well equipped with the tools to promote a culture of sustainable development and activate research in this field.

This goal will be achieved through the development of a Joint Honours Programme in technical disciplines for talented PhD candidates who wish to become ambassadors for Sustainable Development.

Specific aims are planned on three levels.

Institutional level: to co-design and implement a Joint Honours Programme for PhD talented candidates across the partner university as an asset for international cooperation to boost the contribution of multidisciplinary science and competences in the sustainable transition in both EU and AU universities.

People level: to enrich the capacity of PhD candidates and provide them with a proper enabling environment in term of skills and platform, to act as science ambassadors to boost sustainable innovation in the EU-AU countries partner universities.

Strategic level: to consolidate PhD education as a strategic asset for countries and regions since it fosters the role of science diplomacy and responsible research, to create an added value for society and policy makers when dealing with the global and just sustainable transition.

AMBITION is the first joint initiative developed by the IDEA League Expert Working Group “Partnerships with African Universities and Institutions”, that aims to strengthen and expand IDEA League’s collaborations with African universities by promoting and addressing the global challenges as outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals.

The partners in the project are: Politecnico di Milano (coordinator), RWTH Aachen University (Germany), Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), TU Delft (Netherlands), Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Ghana), Strathmore University (Ghana), and ETH Zurich (Switzerland) as an associate partner.

Uforest: from grey to green

Posted on 18/11/202206/08/2024 by Erik Franco

According to the United Nation Department for Economic and Social Affairs, by 2050 68% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas. Over the next few years, climate change and urbanisation will be two of the most important challenges our societies have ever faced.

Uforest is a project co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission and it aims at promoting Europe’s innovation capacity among universities, cities and businesses to deliver a new approach to Urban Forestry. The project created a cross-sectoral alliance for the development of new training and support for students and professionals working towards innovative urban forestry projects.

Join, learn and green your city!

Urban forests can provide an efficient solution for greener, healthier, and more sustainable cities, but often their implementation faces many barriers. For this reason, facilitating the implementation of urban forestry projects is fundamental.

During the last few months, the Uforest team produced 20 case studies on innovative urban forestry initiatives around Europe and Reports about the theme, such as the “Blueprint for Innovation in Urban Forestry” which provides a comprehensive overview of the main challenges faced by the European urban forestry sector. The aim was to better understand the current framework in which urban forestry projects are implemented and how innovation grows.

Discover more on the project

DC4DM Project

Posted on 20/01/202206/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Digital Creativity for developing Digital Maturity future skills (DC4DM) is the three-year research project funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme. Its main objective is to implement, apply and disseminate the DC4DM educational model to develop and empower digital creative abilities to strategically drive the application of future emerging digital technologies in any field.

Shared within a European network of HEIs, SMEs and Startups, Business Incubators, the DC4DM model will train talents that will enable companies to achieve digital maturity. They will become Digital Maturity Enablers.

Design, with its human-centred approach, plays a key role in this transformation. As researchers and educators, we must update our educational models and train the necessary skills so that our students are able to strategically address the future social and environmental challenges of the future by exploiting the opportunities offered by emerging digital technologies, keeping people at the centre.
Project Coordinator Marita Canina, Associate Professor and scientific head of the research lab IDEActivity Centre

The DC4DM model, developed considering the main Digitally Mature company’s needs, promotes the development and empowerment of creativity, design and entrepreneurial skills with tools and methods to adapt and advance new collaborative practices, integrating digital technologies, creative process and design in order to boost employability, and companies’ competitiveness and innovation potential, in different contexts of application. For each identified need, the model integrates the specific set of skills defined as Digital Creative Abilities (DCA) that empower people to express their creative potential and think and act in a non-predictable digital world. The skills included in the model are structured along different dimensions, among these, the Digital Sustainability and Responsibility become therefore a pillar on which the model is based. This dimension includes the future, ethical and sustainable thinking skills relevant when designing for uncertain digital futures.

The project main outcome will be an educational box that includes the action model and the tools and methods to train cross-functional teams of design, engineer, business students to face the complex real-world challenges brought by digital transformation.

The ongoing digital evolution is having a strong impact on every sector of our society, creating opportunities and threats that need to be strategically addressed and managed.

The consortium, coordinated by Prof. Marita Canina, Associate Professor at the Department of Design and scientific head of the research lab IDEActivity Centre, includes 4 universities from 3 EU countries – Politecnico di Milano (IT), Universitè Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne (FR), Institut Mines-Telecom (FR), Universidade de Madeira (PT) – and one business incubator – Startup Madeira (PT).

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