TU Dublin’s Enterprise Academy and GrowthHub facilitated a 2-day Enterprise Challenge sponsored by Travelport
A key role of the TU Dublin Enterprise Academy is to facilitate and encourage engagement between enterprise, students and the University. Enterprise Challenges, one way of doing this, are an important opportunity for students to engage with enterprise and develop experiential learning as they link their academic study and theory to real industrial practice. Such challenges offer students an opportunity to build their self-confidence as they refine their transversal skills such as communication, team-working and problem solving, broaden their knowledge base and improve their overall employability upon graduation. While student cohorts benefit from engaging with enterprise, the enterprise also benefits, from the energy, new perspectives and ideas that students can offer businesses.
To support this mission the Enterprise Academy and fellow Human Capital Initiative-project GROWTHhub facilitated a 2-day Enterprise Challenge sponsored by worldwide travel retail platform Travelport on the Grangegorman Campus on May 23rd and 24th. Students from across the university formed multi-disciplinary teams to consider how changing technologies will improve the travel experience for users of travel apps.
Over two days the teams worked to map the user experience, conduct research to identify specific problems to address, identified appropriate solutions through ideation and prioritisation sessions before creating digital prototypes of their preferred solution and pitching the idea to a group of judges from our enterprise partner and academia. Prizes were awarded for the most innovative idea, the best pitch presentation and the overall enterprise challenge winners.
Very positive feedback was received from our sponsor:
“We were truly inspired by the disruptive ideas the students presented. I'm not sure who had the greater challenge... the students or the judges!”
And student participants had favorable experiences:
“I liked the challenge of being introduced to a completely fresh industry I don't know about and having to think about it in a critical way”
“I really enjoyed working with students in other disciplines and industrial backgrounds, and learning about different approaches and points of view”.
“The problems we were presented with made us think hard and try to innovate to come up with a good solution”.
Engaging with such enterprise challenges equip learners with recognized transversal skills like complex problem-solving, critical thinking, innovation, creativity, communication, team-work, leadership, inclusion and resilience. The next iteration of the Enterprise Challenge programme is currently in development and further details will be announced shortly. If you're interested in participating or learning more, reach out to Kevin Delaney (kevin.delaney@tudublin.ie) and Niamh O'Hora (niamh.ohora@tudublin.ie).
