The Future of Work demo project kicks off

On top of what Eindhoven Engine does with its regular projects and the community building around it, we also want to launch projects that are challenge-driven, multidisciplinary and promise to be impactful. Can we use the collective intelligence of students, the founding partners of Eindhoven Engine and the Brainport Region to contribute to the co-creation of solutions for those wicked problems in an open innovation manner? Eindhoven Engine has identified a few potential demo projects and wants to kick off with the ‘Future of Work’.

In a world in which we do not know how half of all jobs will look in ten years’ time, what will the relationship be between work and (lifelong) learning? Is remote work more effective and/or flexible and does it contribute to a better life/work balance?  Do the lessons learnt from the corona crisis mean that we should fundamentally rethink what we do and how we do it? Can technology play an interesting and impactful role and what would this look like? Many challenging questions for which we do not have the answers; hence, a real wicked problem.

Business Model Innovation approach

At this stage, Eindhoven Engine Academy wants to prepare the launch of the demo project through a series of four seminars with a limited number of participants from the founding fathers (TU/e, Fontys, TNO), our own team, some volunteers that are active in current projects and a few students. We are going to follow a compressed format of the Business Model Innovation approach mentioned in our previous newsletter, bringing it together in four two-hour sessions and continuous group work in between the sessions. Each session has a theme, after which the groups will work in co-creation on the definition of the project.

The themes covered are: a complex world creating wicked problems; design thinking and systems thinking; complex adaptive systems and collective intelligence; organizing for emergence.

In a month’s time, we will have the context and the briefing for our first demo project: the Future of Work.