After an extensive planning and setup phase ProVIL kicked off on 3rd May 2017 at IPEK – Institute of Product Engineering at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany.
Within ProVIL 49 master students in mechanical engineering face the product development challenge in the field of “vehicles for future sharing economies”. For this, they will develop solutions following a product development process in four phases during the summer semester 2017. During the course, the students’ collaboration is mainly coordinated and conducted on an innovation platform. On this platform the students are supported by 16 innovation coaches (industrial engineering students from Hochschule Karlsruhe).
During the kickoff, the students got to know each other and the innovation coaches. Apart from this, the product development challenge was presented and discussed with the students. This was supported by a keynote speech provided by David Storer, mobility expert at the Science2Society beneficiary Centro Ricerche Fiat (CRF). The kickoff closed with a project barbecue.
Apart from its character as innovation project ProVIL serves as a Live-Lab. As such, it enables the scientific evaluation of new or improved processes, methods and tools of co-creation with the focus of distributed product development. As responsible professor, Albert Albers highlights: “For us, ProVIL represents a very promising co-creation format which adds value to all of the three pillars Research, Teaching and Innovation.”
