(535)STUDENT BRAIN: TOOLS AND METHODS TO SUPPORT THE STUDENTS CREATIVITY AND TO IMPROVE THE LEARNING AND CO-LEARNING PROCESSES - THE POLIBRAIN CASE

摘要

The current scenario is characterized by great economic and social trends like the increasingrelevance of the creativity and the ideas generation, the network’s innovation power and theinformation technology growth.The paper offer the results of a research aimed to understand the impact of these factors on thestudents education process and the way their creativity can contribute to the economic and socialdevelopment.We have considered the last creativity based economic theory (Florida R., Hippel E. V., Tapscott D.,Rifkin J., Howe J.)and then we have analyzed both the old and the new models related with theresearch’s topic: from the classical business incubator to the last crowdsourcing and creativecommunities (Startup Weekend, H-farmventures, Innocentive, Crowdspring, OpenIdeo,…).Trying to deepen the matter we designed a service, integrated with the academic environment, thatencourages the entrepreneurship of the design students and supports the creation of project teams.Polibrain is characterized by open innovation and online collaborative tools and provides a webplatform that is the main touchpoint with which the users (students, teachers and guests)get incontact.PoliBrain platform acts primarily on 4 different sides:- It makes the students’ and teachers’ relations easier, more frequent and more efficient.- It removes the cultural and physical walls between the different degrees and the different faculties,creating multidisciplinary networks.- It makes students’ projects and innovations visible to external subject like companies and investorsand directly funds the best ones.- It provides reputation, visibility and new contacts to the University.The platform plans some of the classic social network’s features but unlike them it’s not limited tointeraction: it’s focused on the collaboration processes, allowing the development of projects from theconcept and recruiting phases to the fund raising stage.The implementation in the academic environment (we chose the Design Faculty of the Politecnico diMilano as proving ground)assures some special factors which make the creative process extremelyefficient:- There are tens of thousands of students working in different fields and characterized by differentskills and competences and they all could be potential collaborators for the development of othersstudents’ projects.- There is a high level of pro-activity and freshness of the ideas, the students’ approach to innovationis often free of preconceptions.- There are a lot of teachers with specializations and experience in every fields who could be thementors of some students’ projects.- The University has a lot of resources and got the capacity to attract investors and partners.PoliBrain allows not only a more effective support to the project’s development increasing theirpossibilities to reach and to go beyond the early stage, it also provide specific benefits to theUniversity and its community.All the features and the tools implemented in the platform are already available on the web, in factPolibrain is not aimed to a “technologic innovation” but to a “social innovation”: it use the technology tochange the actors role and to enlarge their opportunities, to grant more flexibility and to increase theinteractivity of the system.