Student-centric Practices in Changing Times

Alexandra Petcu, Head of Innovation and Technology Transfer, West University of Timisoara

Alexandra Petcu, Head of Innovation and Technology Transfer, West University of Timisoara

Alexandra Petcu is the Head of Innovation and Technology Transfer at the West University of Timisoara and coordinates the open innovation office at the university. She has experience in teaching and training, mainly within the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. Her work has also focused on higher education public policy recommendations, with the aim to achieve more flexible career paths and more inclusive higher education. She has more than 15 years of experience in hazardous waste management and entrepreneurship for environmental protection.

What are some of the challenges you come across while implementing some practices to help students become better entrepreneurs or build more sustainable companies?

The first challenge is to make students aware that entrepreneurship is indeed a career path anyone can choose. During the past 30-plus years, the cultural backgrounds in Romania’s transformation process tend to see entrepreneurship as a profit-oriented opportunity. One of the main challenges is changing the mindset and making people understand entrepreneurship’s importance. You can also do that if you want to put your entrepreneurial thinking into action for a profit-oriented or socially-oriented company. We are working on both ends and provide education and training for an entrepreneurial mindset, while also supporting students and staff to create their startups or spinoffs, subject to the level of research results that they integrate into it.

Regarding sustainability, I am very lucky to say that it has become more and more a natural interest and inclination of students to go for more innovative, digitized and greener solutions. Nature-friendly solutions are being considered by the younger generation for the business profile they choose. This enables us to provide them with support in both the research and administrative aspect of setting up a company.

"We are expanding our horizons in terms of teaching and learning practices, enabling the students to be more focused on real-life, user-centric topics. Professors have been open to embedding challenge-based learning, where students can have a deeper look at real-life setting and community needs, to include in their studies."

Could you tell me about the sustainable solutions or technology your students have created during their learning process?

The university I represent is a comprehensive university with various streams, such as STEAM, culture, creativity, social sciences and humanities, as well as physical education and sports. Two years ago, we launched a project, which was based on an entrepreneurial discovery process focused on interdisciplinarity. We are encouraging students from different study programs to team up with each other. We have seen students from informatics teaming up with geographers to provide solutions for technological advancements in GIS studies or satellite imaging of agriculture fields, to identify pesticides in the soil. We have communication and data management students who are also teaming up in climate change action. There is a variety of projects where students and staff collaborate to provide solutions relevant to our stakeholders, while also contributing to mapping these stakeholders based on their interest/ contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Have the disruptions from the pandemic affected any of your operations? And what are the new trends that you see with students returning to college and interacting with teachers?

It will be the first academic year that we resume to full face-to-face teaching and learning format. However, the Romanian education law permits us for at least master courses to consider part of the courses to be held online. The main changes we have seen were accelerating the digitization process of education, in both teaching and learning and associated administrative processes. On both ends, we are looking at universities being more open and contributing to the transformation of generations. This means that the pandemic and all the digital solutions are making the process more inclusive and engaging. We are expanding our horizons in terms of venues, creating more coworking spaces within our classes, enabling the students to be more focused on real-life topics. Professors are keen on students taking on challenges from real-life settings to be included in their studies.

Do you have any advice you would like to give your counterparts or your peers in the industry on how to push students to create something new, create some new technologies, or create sustainable practices?

In our view, any person from any community be it a citizen, a private company, an NGO or public administration representative, can submit challenges to our university and our fellow universities. These challenges become projects that students work on, where they can provide entrepreneurial solutions relevant to the market and to companies. One should also consider a quadruple helix approach to any innovation process, relevant for both innovation generated in academia and innovation developed in the private sector or civil society. It is important to ensure that we have all stakeholders on board when discussing any project, from a co-creation phase to an actual test bed and validation of the solutions. This is to ensure that whatever solution and technology we provide is acceptable to the market, while also more technologically mature.