Convene – Transforming university enterprise engagement for a more sustainable and resilient Ireland

Since its foundation, UCD Innovation Academy has explored ways to formally and informally engage industry expertise in education. Our teaching and learning team is made up of Entrepreneurial Specialists and Facilitators, all with extensive experience in enterprise, these positions are unique to the Innovation Academy. Through Convene, we’ve created five new roles that bring enterprise and higher education closer together: Head of Operational Innovation; Educational Innovation Lead; Technology Integration Manager, Strategic Partnerships Lead and a Creative Makers Facilitator. 

We’re tapping into the knowledge and resources of enterprise to co-develop teaching and learning programmes that meet future skills needs. In a major collaboration with enterprise, we’re working with Cappfinity, a global strengths assessment organisation, to co-develop a self-led virtual reality programme that develops transversal skills. The programme takes the learner through a series of real-life workplace experiences in virtual reality informed by our decade of experience delivering experiential, immersive education. Through our learning partnerships model, we seek to demonstrate how higher education institutions and enterprise can work together for our mutual benefit. 

Global Innovation Teams is a unique educational model involving multi-disciplinary teams of students working on ‘real world’ enterprise challenges with the support of enterprise mentors. It’s been a core part of our pedagogical approach at UCD Innovation Academy from the outset. Through this approach, we’re cultivating entrepreneurial mindsets among our learners and helping to prepare them for the challenges and opportunities of the fourth industrial revolution. We’ve worked with hundreds of enterprise partners of all types since we launched this model in 2010 including multinational companies like PWC, IBM and Deloitte, SMEs and social enterprises. Through Convene, we’re scaling up this approach within UCD and offering new Global Innovation Teams undergraduate modules, incorporating new themes including sustainability and digital resilience, and exploring ways to refine and evolve our model for ourselves and others.

At UCD Innovation Academy, we provide students with the skills and mindset to thrive in a fast changing world and the workplace of the future. We want our students to live well in the world, for the betterment of society and the economy. Through Convene, we’ve launched a MakerSpace to help achieve these aims.

UCD Innovation Academy MakerSpace

The MakerSpace is a place to cultivate and address the skills of the future; a place to involve enterprise and break down the barriers between industry and academia; and a place to explore the potential of enterprise to augment and contribute to higher education, through content partnerships and more. In October 2021 we launched Ireland’s first multidisciplinary MakerSpace elective, Designing the Future. Our MakerSpace includes a range of 3D printers, plastics recycling and repurposing equipment, vacuum forming and mould making equipment, laser cutters and virtual reality headsets. We’re working on incorporating the MakerSpace into more of our programmes, partnering with technology enterprise partners, embedding sustainability into our MakerSpace and empowering more students to understand and experiment with new technologies. 

When the Human Capital Initiative was launched in 2019 it set out to support innovative delivery methods in higher education. Just months later, this aspiration became a necessity when higher education institutions switched, many overnight, to online learning in March 2020. For UCD Innovation Academy, the challenge was two-fold: adapting our curriculum to online learning but also adapting our unique pedagogy to an online format including experiential learning, collaboration with enterprise, and learning from doing. The result? A hugely successful transition that saw our undergraduate numbers doubling in 2020/21 and a realisation, like others in our field, of the potential for online learning when done right to be  more than just a stopgap in times of crisis. With support from Convene, we’re continuing to capture, present and scale parts of our curriculum online, explore hybrid online and in-person approaches as well as experiment with 3D immersive environments and virtual reality collaboration.