TecHUB 4.0 - Technology and Entrepreneurship Education for Bridging the Gap in Smart Product Development

Abstract

Additive manufacturing is a worldwide trend and has been successfully adopted in a wide variety of domains. With applications ranging from automotive, aerospace, military, consumer goods bioprinting and even wearable electronics, the need for trained workforce in additive manufacturing is in high demand. Academia all around the world is adapting to this new trend trying to develop new strategies in delivering suitable competences to their undergraduate, masters’ and PhD students. Such an initiative is the Erasmus+ project TecHUB 4.0 which brings together four complementary universities from Romania, United Kingdom and Poland. The main goal of the project is to bring together professors, industry specialists, researchers, managers, and entrepreneurs to deliver, using methods based on modern teaching technologies, especially on the use of web-based platforms and digital technologies – e-learning and interactive platforms, their knowledge to the young students wishing to become entrepreneurs in the additive manufacturing area. An Open Interactive Platform will be designed to be used equally by companies, by universities and by students, which will aggregate the demand and offer for internships developed in the scope of developing projects anchored in the day-to-day additive manufacturing business activity to solve concrete problems, but at the same time respecting all the economic constraints imposed on a business at beginning of its life.

Entrepreneurship in the Digital and Industry 4.0 Age: A semi-systematic literature review

“…Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) was developed as a virtual reality (VR) educational environment, and is expected to create more attractive ways of teaching (Palkova et al, 2016, de Mattos, & Popovici, 2018. Other such projects are: a start-up simulation platform for innovation and entrepreneurship in the Life Sciences field (Toma et al, 2020), a social game built as a 3D virtual world for teaching entrepreneurship to young business practitioners (Ionitescu et al, 2019a), software for innovation training and decision making within textiles enterprises (Blaga et al, 2017), an interactive platform for entrepreneurship education in the additive manufacturing area (Ulmeanu et al, 2019), and a VR educational platform for teaching agriculture entrepreneurship, expected to increase young students' motivation, as they are also using this technology for entertainment (Ionitescu et al, 2019b).…”