News

We announced our Key-Speaker!

Jan is Director of Studies on the programme Advanced Business Creation (BBA) in the Academy for Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Avans University. Furthermore, Jan is founder and director at the Innovative Dutch, developer of online business strategy games in the field of innovation management.

AceOn Group working closely with University of Wolverhampton

ACEON Group is currently working closely with University of Wolverhampton in various projects. According to the Managing Director, Mr. Mark Thompson, his collaboration with the university generates a wide range of benefits for all the parties involved. Currently, he is working in two projects together with the university: 1) The Challenge Academy, working together with the University of Wolverhampton Business School, Faculty of Social Sciences (FOSS) supporting a platform that enables companies to post problems where students and academics can work together to solve company’s problem, and; 2) The Built Environment Climate Change Innovations (BECCI) project, involves helping businesses develop new or improved energy efficient products, engage with housing providers in the region to support the use of more green products and give companies access to the latest information and knowledge on low carbon technologies. Recently, AceOn was not only shortlisted by the Accord Group to attend a Dragon’s Den-style event competing with other 6 companies, but also triumphly won the grant to come out with a sustainable battery home storage system. Not only that, by participating on the Challenge Academy platform, the company managed to receive interesting ideas and solutions on its supply chain issue, shared on the platform. Mr. Thompson also shares his experiences in growing his business with the university students who are interested in opening up their own business. For him, successful university-industry collaborations should achieve mutual benefits, that is, ensuring that an appropriate balance between academic objectives and industrial priorities is achieved. He also added that Ensuring students to have relevant skills once they graduated are crucial; and perhaps from his opinion, students attending knowledge sharing sessions with companies may be able to helps academic in doing their task.

Challenge Academy Workshop

During the month of October and November 2014, the Higher Education Institutions and the Research Institute that are part of the project organized one workshop at their institution. The aim of this activity was to raise awareness about the benefits that the platform could bring to their users. There were a total of 8 workshops, one for each country of the partnership.