Piloting, evaluation and sustainability of InnoSkills platform

1. Piloting, evaluation and sustainability of InnoSkills platform InnoSkills – The Final Event September 30, 2010 Treviso, Italy Jiří Vacek, Dana Egerová, Milan Edl University of West Bohemia vacekj@kpm.zcu.cz, egerova@kpm.zcu.cz, edl@kpv.zcu.cz UWB - InnoSkills Final event

2. Platform components • Multimedia tutorial and self-evaluation tool facilitate the first contact with the platform; • Innovation Guide, available online and enriched by multimedia components, covers broad range of issues related to innovationmanagement; for off-line study the Guide is available in pdf; • Resource library – to be further developed, focus on specific case studies; • Innovation rooms – useful tools supporting creativity, knowledge sharing and collaboration; • The Informal and Cooperative Learning Guide – unique component summarizing experience from piloting and providing examples of practical use of provided tools. UWB - InnoSkills Final event

3. Project team tools • Team Organizer – LinkMV; shared working space, each work package having its directory. • Open source content management tool TYPO3 used for both back-end and front-end on-line contents maintenance and presentation. • Project team members gained experience with these kind of tools, can build on it in their future work. UWB - InnoSkills Final event

4. Piloting of project deliverables • UWB students and participating SMEs – evaluation of the platform functionality, contents and format. • Provided feedback: very positive, unfortunately much weaker response rate than expected. • Workshop on the use of one of the innovation rooms tools – collaborative text processors. UWB - InnoSkills Final event

5. Collaborative text processors • Business Innovation Center Plzeň (BIC) collaborates on development of project proposals with the Technology Center of the Czech Academy of Sciences (TC). They realized the potential of collaborative tools presented in the corresponding Innovation room. • UWB consultants prepared the brief training for BIC and TC consisting of brief introduction to collaborative tools, their possibilities, advantages and disadvantages. • The participants then created their accounts and practically trained the use of Zoho Writer and Google Docs. • During preparation of the training, we learned about broad class of collaborative tools, not limited to text processing (spread sheets, presentations, and many more). • The participants were introduced to much discussed new technologies of cloud computing. UWB - InnoSkills Final event

6. Feedback • Very positive evaluation of the platform content, structure, format. Especially positively valued multimedia components and broad coverage of innovation management issues. • The users would welcome further development of the platform by case studies, units on project management, business planning and knowledge management. • The platform fills in the gap in practical approach to innovation training, use of methods and tools. • Especially valuable are answers to open questions – they can be used for further development of the platform. UWB - InnoSkills Final event

7. Sustainability • In the university courses on innovation management (UWB and ERASMUS students); • Customized trainings for SMEs; • Results disseminated through Chambers of Commerce, Czech Association of Innovative Entrepreneurship, etc. • The UWB team members themselves acquired new knowledge and skills they can use in their further work and share the experience with their colleagues. • The project created space for further cooperation between project partners. UWB - InnoSkills Final event

8. Acknowledgements • To European Commission and its Leonardo da Vinci program. • To all partners for their collective efforts that allowed to create very useful product, especially to Treviso Tecnologia for project coordination and to Link MV for providing the tools for platform development. UWB - InnoSkills Final event