UC-CROWD is a European project which is ongoing since October 2013, with support of the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission. ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon is the coordinator of the 13 partners consortium across Europe which includes 7 Higher Education Institutions, 5 Companies and 1 Research Centre.

This project aims to strengthen links between companies and Higher Education Institutions (HEI) by creating a bridge between two different worlds. We want companies to share their problems with the academia and therefore professors and students from all around Europe gather innovative solutions for them. Crowdsourcing is a open opportunity to people experience new creative ways to solve problems. We want HEI’s, in a general way, to be innovative and to help companies find new solutions to be more competitive. This is a platform to match companies needs and academia projects.

Our vision is to contribute to create closer links between companies and HEI and as a result to develop companies more innovative and HEI’s studding problems that real matters to companies

I.To transfer the crowdsourcing model into the academic environment;
II.To promote the adjustment of the curricula to the needs of the companies;
III.To exchange ideas and enhance synergy’s between companies and HEIs;
IV.To reinforce the communication and knowledge transference between employers and those o educate them;
V.To give an opportunities to professors present themselves to companies and listening the real world problems and as result decrease the ditch between them;
VI.To contribute to European economic growth through more well trained human resources;
VII.To create a network of companies and HEI’s in the field of energy.

In the first stage of the project, we are focused on asking the academics, students and business about their needs and expectations regarding the open innovation platform – hearing opinions and ideas to implement on the platform. The second stage will be dedicate to the technological development, based on results supplied by the previous stage. In the third stage the platform will be implemented and used by professors, students and companies will use it.

We analyse some crowdsourcing and open innovation platforms, and we meet with some companies (in Portugal) to better understand their point of view about the idea. We can say that in some areas like design and information technology, this type of platform is well developed. However, we did not find a platform specifically for the energy field. We spoke with some companies that are developing their own, but they are experiencing some problems, like “How to attract solvers for the problems submitted?” and “How to can we maintain active participant interest?” By developing this project, we aim to help companies overcome the difficulties by increasing the number of students and professors using crowdsourcing platforms, and as result they will maintain their interest in being there.