innXchange: Increasing innovation potential by European-African cooperation

The project innXchange is a capacity building project aimed at strengthening entrepreneurial training and encouraging entrepreneurial thinking through the development of partnerships between academic institutions and commercial research organizations from Africa and Europe. The goal of the project is to create a set of guidelines that serve as a guide for academic and industry researchers on how to: a) Identify research problems with real-world relevance b) Identify innovative solutions to those problems c) Evaluate the potential of ideas in terms of technical innovation d) Evaluate the potential of the ideas in terms of market demand and commercialization e) Consider the relevance of IPR f) Convert an innovation into a commercial product. Accompanying research will elucidate strategies for the generation of innovation across all participating European and African countries. To achieve the above goal, the following objectives are proposed: 1. Determine the state of the art with regards to innovation management at the participating institutions, placing emphasis on the way in which innovation is managed in Europe and Africa, the similarities and differences of the European and African approaches, the significance of culture and context within the innovation process. (WP 1). 2. Conduct an ?Innovation Camps? in each participating country, with the aim to create an initial set of innovation guidelines (a) - (f), as above, taking into account country differences, culture and contextual relevance. (WP 2). 3. Conduct ?Innovation Creator? during which the initial guidelines will be evaluated and refined. The initial guidelines will be evaluated by using existing patents to create innovative solutions for solving a real countryspecific challenge. The required changes and refinements, which will become evident in the practical application of the guidelines, will also be made. (WP 3). 4. Prepare a roadmap for future research. (WP 4). The guidelines will first be developed in selected science disciplines. Science fields which have been identified to have a high innovation potential are Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) field, and the healthcare field. In both fields we observe a fast and highly dynamic development by interdisciplinary interaction; there is a strong link to ICT because of the rapidly growing amount of data generated for a patient.