EIT Digital Doctoral School: A new program for ICT innovators

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1 Int'l Conf. Frontiers in Education: CS and CE FECS' EIT Digital Doctoral School: A new program for ICT innovators Anders Flodström EIT Digital KTH Royal Institute of Technology Maurizio Gabbrielli EIT Digital DISI, University of Bologna INRIA, Focus Team Abstract We describe the European EIT Digital Doctoral School, whose mission is to educate tomorrow s leaders and innovators in digital technologies by combining excellent technical programs with deeply embedded Innovation and Entrepreneurship education. 1 I. INTRODUCTION The last thirty years have witnessed a dramatic change in the perspective of doctoral level education in the world. Such a change is due to the following facts: 1) The percentage of doctoral graduates among the population is constantly increasing, as shown in figure 1. 2) The percentage of doctoral graduates who can find a job in Academia is dramatically decreasing: some indications can be obtained from figures 2 and 3, as well as from the data in [7]. 3) The number of young researchers working in the private sector is increasing in many countries: for example, the data for France are given in [6] and shown in figure 4. While the first fact is quite simple to explain, since the level of education in general is increasing, the second one is more complicated and has to do with societal, economic and also technological issues, whose analysis is beyond the scope of this paper. It is however a quite clear trend, which will probably last for many years. The third fact is somehow related to the second one, even though the relation is more complicated that a simple cause-effect one. These facts have the quite obvious consequence that, for an increasing number of persons, a Ph.D. degree is now seen as a gate to high level positions in the industry, both in large companies and in new startups. And such a consequence, in its turn, has a direct corollary which can be stated as follows: Universities should also do more to help their Ph.D. students to gain skills and contacts that will come in handy beyond academia [5]. In particular, it would be very important to provide to Ph.D. students, together with a good technical formation, some basic education on innovation and entrepreneurial activities. Despite this quite clear evidence the current situation in Europe in not completely satisfactory for ICT. In fact, on one hand there exist traditional Ph.D. programs on ICT disciplines which provide excellent technical content but do not touch 1 The first author is Education Director of EIT Digital, the second one is the Director of the EIT Digital Doctoral School. on innovation and entrepreneurial aspects. On the other hand, these aspects are provided in business oriented programs, which however fail to provide the technology mastering which today is needed to successfully operate in the innovation area of ICT. There is then an increasing need for Industrial Doctorate programs which are able to coniugate technical education with business and innovation oriented training. This is by now clearly recognized at EU level, where indeed specific programs of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) framework are targeting this need. In particular, the European Industrial Doctorates within the Innovative Training Networks program (ITN-EID) aim to provide a doctoral level education to a new generation of creative, entrepreneurial and innovative earlystage researchers, able to face current and future challenges and to convert knowledge and ideas into products and services for economic and social benefit. In such an ITN-EID program it is explicitly required that the Ph.D. candidates receive a supplementary training on Innovation and Entrepeneruship (I&E) aspects and that, together with the usual academic advisor, they are mentored also by a person from the nonacademic environment. These requirements are exactly those which, since 2012, are the basis of the EIT Digital Doctoral School, where students receive a technical education in one of the 18 partner universities in Europe, while the I&E education is provided in our 7 Doctoral Training Centres located in five different countries in Europe. Exploiting synergies with other European programs, such as the MSCA ITN-EID, we believe that the EIT Digital Doctoral School can play a unique role in generating European ICT leaders that can face the challenges of ICT innovation in Europe and drive the process to achieve a better quality innovation, thus contributing to Europe s competitiveness and growth. The remaining of this paper is organized as follows. Section II presents in some more detail the structure of EIT Digital Doctoral School, focusing on the organization of I&E Education and providing some evidence of the value of our mode coming from our industrial partners and our students, while Section III contains some closing remarks.

2 224 Int'l Conf. Frontiers in Education: CS and CE FECS'16 Fig. 1. New doctoral graduates (ISCED 6) per thousand population aged 25-34, EU, US and Japan, (UNESCO, EUROSTAT, OECD). II. STRUCTURE EIT Digital [1] is a Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) [2]. As a such, the mission of EIT Digital is to lead European digital innovation and entrepreneurial education, thus driving Europe s digital transformation. It does this by mobilising an ecosystem of over 130 top European corporations, SMEs, start-ups, universities and research institutes and using a pan-european network of Co-Location Centres (CLC) in Berlin, Eindhoven, Helsinki, London, Paris, Stockholm, Trento, as well as in Budapest and Madrid. EIT Digital is focused on entrepreneurship and is at the forefront of integrating education, research and business by bringing together students, researchers, engineers, business developers and entrepreneurs, focusing on the following Europe s strategic, societal challenges: Digital Industry, Digital Cities, Digital Wellbeing and Digital Infrastructure. The EIT Digital education programme includes a Master School, a Doctoral School and a Professional School. Here we focus on the Doctoral School (DSL), whose mission is to educate tomorrow s leaders and innovators in digital technologies by combining excellent technical programs with deeply embedded Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) education. The technical program is carried out in a partner university according to the local rules. We have currently 18 partner universities in six different European countries (Hungary, Finland, France, Italy, Sweden and Spain), hence rules and requirements for Ph.D. education are quite different. However all the Ph.D. programs of these universities have a very good quality, as assessed by standard international rankings. On the other hand the I&E education, which is the main activity our Doctoral School, is organized and coordinated by the central Doctoral School office in such a way that, despite the different implementations in various parts of Europe, we can maintain a uniform level of content and quality. More precisely, the I&E education is delivered in our Doctoral Training Centers (DTCs): these are places, located in EIT Digital CLC, which provide geographic and thematic focus and aim to create a critical mass of doctoral candidates, in a single place, around a few single themes or technologies and surrounded by an ecosystem of involved industries. There are currently 7 DTCs in Budapest, Helsinki, Madrid Paris, Rennes, Sophia-Antipolis and Trento, and each one of them is closely

3 Int'l Conf. Frontiers in Education: CS and CE FECS' Fig. 2. Trends in employment of S&E Ph.D. graduates in the US (NSF). connected to some local partner universities and companies which support its activity. It is also worth noting that in the colocation centers there are ongoing project activities, supported by EIT Digital, in the context of the previously mentioned strategic areas (Digital Cities, Digital Health, Digital Industry and Digital Infrastructure). Being in the colocation centers then our students can be exposed directly to relevant projects of our partner companies. The I&E education consists of three main components: Four courses to be attended during the doctoral studies; One period of six months of mobility abroad; A six months period of internship in an industrial environment, called Business Development Experience (BDExp). The courses provide a specific education toward the innovation and the business world which usually is not contained in the standard Ph.D. technical programs in ICT. We have the following four modules: Raising Awareness (RA). Typically a two days course introducing the EIT Digital DSL education and discussing mainly the methodologies to assess the value of research in innovation, trying to focus on customer centric perspectives. Opportunity Recognition (OR). This a five days course which address the problem of identifying value elements in research and relating them to innovation and business activities, thus answering to the needs of industry, customers and more generally society. Initial aspects related to concept design and business modeling are also considered. Business Modeling and Development (BMD). This course usually span over 15 weeks (part time) and address the typical aspects related to business modeling and planning, with a particular focus on ICT areas. We also address aspects related to the ability to exploit business value elements in research and technology and we touch on communication skills. Growth and Harvest (GH). Usually a one-two weeks course covering mainly the application of concepts, methods and tools pertaining to business development, to manage and finance the growth of a company and to exploit innovation. The second component of our education is a period of geographical mobility of six months, preferably in a partner university or company in Europe, in which the students have

4 226 Int'l Conf. Frontiers in Education: CS and CE FECS' Fig. 3. Careers in and outside science in UK (Royal Society). ( ) Effectifs totaux de R&D (en ETP) Chercheurs (en ETP) * Fig. 4. Researchers in private companies in France. Data in FTE. Source: MESR-DGESIP/DGRI-SIES C1.

5 Int'l Conf. Frontiers in Education: CS and CE FECS' Fig. 5. Distribution of students per DTC. a chance to visit other laboratories and to get in contact with different research and innovation environments. Vey important for our programme is also the Business Development Experience (BDExp): this is a six months period which lets doctoral candidates or fresh doctors be immersed (for at least six months) in a real business-oriented context. The BDexp may be implemented as an internship in some company, or as a pre-incubation stay in an innovation friendly place, or even by starting-up a new venture. The BDexp should yield a written document which reports on the learning outcomes of this period, which should include skills in applying, synthesizing, and evaluating prior I&E studies, as well as new skills learned during this period. In the ideal case the BDExp should be linked to the doctoral thesis, so that the technical results obtained during the ph.d. studies can be linked to the business world. While in the past the BDExp was done after the completion of the normal Ph.D. activity (usually three years), we are now switching to a more integrated model, where the immersion in the industrial context starts from the very beginning of the doctoral studies. This has the advantage of a more direct contact between the research environment and the industrial one, with the possibility of receiving in both directions more direct feedbacks, thus better exploiting the synergies of the two different worlds. A. Some numbers The EIT Digital Doctoral School was started in November 2012 and since then has constantly augmented the number of students, now reaching a really European dimension, with five countries and 18 universities involved, around 130 students with 63% of them coming from Europe and 21% women and targeting at 200 students in two years. The Figure 5 shows the distribution of the students in the DTCs. The first six students who finished our program graduated in April 2016 an we expect some more twenty students to graduate by the end of Thirty-five Ph.D. candidates have been doing their mobility in fourteen different countries, including US, and around fifteen students are about to finish their Business Development Experience (BDExp). B. Some results All the students who have finished or are finishing our program have received a positive feedback from the labor market: some of them have been employed in relevant positions in R&D labs of a major companies in Europe, while some other successfully created their own startup (six startup have been already created in Finland, France, Hungary and UK). Large companies appreciate our graduates for the technical mastering of new digital technologies, combined with the ability to turn them into business opportunities. The following is a quote from the CTO of IT R&D Division and Director of Central Software Institute Europe, at Huawei European Research Center [3]: Huawei s European Research Center (ERC) aims to become a key technology player in the European ecosystem. In execution of this mission, Huawei is building new and innovative technologies in collaboration with its customers. The scope of the EIT Digital Doctoral School of providing innovationrelated education is important for both Huawei and

6 228 Int'l Conf. Frontiers in Education: CS and CE FECS'16 for the innovation agenda of the EC. Through the EIT education Radu 2 acquired valuable skills for managing and driving innovation which contribute well to our day-to-day business of creating advanced technologies and establishing new partnerships for joint innovation with European customers. Also our graduates are appreciating our program: the following is a the opinion of one of them, who is now starting his own startup [4]: The EIT Digital Doctoral School programme was a very important training. It developed the skills and the knowledge that I needed for starting a business and that I could never have obtained otherwise, in a standard PhD programme. Thanks to the EIT DSL, I am still a scientist, but now partly a CEO as well. III. CONCLUSIONS Our first graduates are already actively working as innovators in the R&D divisions of major companies and in their own start-ups. These examples confirm the added value of our students: a deep technical mastering of new digital technologies, combined with strong problem solving skills, and the ability to turn them into business opportunities. We are now fine-tuning our programme in order to find the right balance between academic and industrial education and we are also working on the integration with other national and European programs in order to build up thematic, permanent networks for industrial PhD education in Europe. As for other educational programs, one of our main challenges is now to measure the impact of our Doctoral School at societal level. REFERENCES [1] EIT. Last retrieved in March [2] EIT Digital. Last retrieved in March [3] Goetz Philip Brasche. Personal communication, [4] Wilfried Dron. Personal communication, [5] Editorial. There is life after academia. Nature, 513(7516), [6] Direction générale pour l enseignement supérieur et l insertion professionnelle. Direction générale pour la recherche et l innovation. L état de l emploi scientifique en France. ens. sup et chercheurs/41/6/ EES pdf, Last retrieved in March In French. [7] The Royal Society. The Scientific Century securing our future prosperity ISBN: Radu Tudoran is the first graduate of EIT Digital Doctoral School, now working at Huawei European Research Center.