One way of achieving ‘open communication’ between academics and the industry, is through co-creation. Co-creation is the cornerstone of open innovation practices in today’s industry. For example, through co-creation, academia can gain useful input from industry, that will eventually lead to more market oriented curriculum and better prepared graduates capable to implement energy efficient operations (EEO). More recently, the concept of targeted open innovation argues that open innovation should be focused, strategic, and tailored to the current needs of the industry, thus universities need to enhance their curricula accordingly. Hence, open innovation and co-creation between academia and industry/SMEs will highly increase academia’s capacity of producing more market oriented curricula that will lead to graduates capable of being next generation leaders in EEO.
To this end, TrainERGY responds to this need by aiming to develop an innovative, evidence-based transnational framework that will markedly improve the knowledge and skills of academic institutions to produce more marked oriented EEO curricula, reducing the barriers in this field. The project consortium comprises key academics, SMEs, and industrial association partners from different sectors who will co-create the envisaged EEO curriculum and will pilot it through an open innovation and co-creation virtual learning environment (VLE).