ORSU’ is an academic project developed by the Department of Economics and Management, University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’ together with Almacube s.r.l- business incubator.
The project aims to improve interactions among University, Institutions and companies. Students are supposed to tackle the challenges set by the companies they have been assigned to; in order to do so, they cooperate hand in hand with the company members. The project not only allows students to experience what is like to be part of a company, but it also enables the skills of dealing with a wide range of issues that have an authentic impact on their city. Thus, companies can explore a whole different way of being innovative, based on the the students’ keynote ideas.
The ORSU’ project draws inspiration from the tried and tested Open Innovation strategies developed by Almacube s.r.l. Those strategies are modelled after the so called "Design Thinking", a problem solving approach divided into 5 steps (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test). Basically, once the company have pointed what the problem is - or the change they would like to bring out- they call form a meeting with the company’s employees, so they can all contribute to figure out the issue. On one hand the Design Thinking procedure greatly values employee’s contribution, on the other to embrace such strategy is to be conscious of their needs. In fact, the team members not only take part to the decision making process, but in the end, they are the ultimate stakeholder that will benefit from such changes. The Design Thinking approach was firstly conceived by the the academics of the Stanford University and currently, companies as Google, Facebook and Airbnb are gaining profits from adopting it. In the Design Thinking uncertainty and mistakes are welcomed, because only after several attempts one can comes up with the most adequate solution to a problem.
On Thursday, 4th March the Archimake team have presented to the Economics and Management students- coordinated by Prof. Mario Carrassi- the challenges they are supposed to be focusing on: which strategies and services are the most effective ones in order to promote cooperation, in a community composed of architects, free-lance designers, artists and photographers?
Students (Vincenzo Basile, Giovanni Bratta, Francesca De Tullio, Livia Panunzio, Chiara Santoro, Michele Tafuni) will get involved in professional experiences, along with a team of peers and colleagues. Tutors Francesco de Cristo and Angela Perrone will head the students team. They will stay the course until they accomplish the task.
