Fostering use of technical spaces in higher education (HEI MAKERS)

 
The aim of the HEI MAKERS project is to increase innovation and creativity through partnership of higher education institutions (HEIs) and technical spaces, leading to trans-disciplinary approaches and new teaching methods in HEI, availability of open resources for formal and non formal education, better entrepreneurial and creativity skills of graduates. Therefore the international HEI MAKERS consortium:

• Fosters collaboration of HEIs, university and private makerspaces, and other businesses;
• Amplifies technological entrepreneurship and technical creativity as key competences;
• Promotes innovative education methods;
• Increases open resources based learning opportunities;
• Recognises competencies gained through active learning at makerspace as per programmes developed;
• Tests the above-mentioned collaboration concept and ensure sustainability of results;
• Identifies and attracts new players who will join the next stages of the HEI MAKERS initiative.

HEI MAKERS will encourage more HEIs to initiate collaboration with makerspaces and re-think their study programmes, to employ innovative training methods and address the challenges of XXI century labour market. Project's outputs will open up new learning opportunities through practical application of entrepreneurial and prototyping skills, which can involve and lead to the commercialization of new services and products, to attracting potential investors, to creation of global start-ups and spin-offs and thus growing economy.
 
Poject partners: Sunrise Valley Science and Technology Park (Lithuania) – project coordinator, LinkMenų fabrikas at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (Lithuania), Association of Technical Spaces (Lithuania), Inventya Ltd (United Kingdom), SC Ludor Engineering SRL (Romania), University Politehnica of Bucharest (Romania), Riga Technical University (Latvia).
 
HEI MAKERS project (N^o 2017-1-LT01-KA203-035231) is co-funded by Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership programme. The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.