Design and implementation of business-academia cooperation for Ukrainian refugees’ resilience
Refugee resilience is forged through collective, cross-sectoral collaboration for social good. Especially in times of social disruption and crises, academia and the private sector are called to unite forces to transform challenges into opportunities, particularly for disadvantaged groups, like refugees, who need to rebuild their lives in new socio-cultural settings. Thus, this report explores the key role of academia-business cooperation in addressing Ukrainian refugee challenges through open innovation and entrepreneurship, as reflected in the AGILE project experimentations.
In particular, the report is part of the Erasmus+-funded AGILE project (“Higher education resilience in refugee crises: Forging social inclusion through capacity building, civic engagement, and skills recognition”), specifically its Work Package 4 Activity 2 (WP4A2)‘Academy-Society Experiment #1: Industry-Academia to address the refugee crisis -Innovation 5.0’. These experimentations aimed to combine academic excellence with business-empowered solutions to build resilience by ensuring inclusion and enhance skills among Ukrainian refugee students and scholars.
The report details a series of four events that brought together academia, business and Ukrainian refugee communities, namely:
- a crash course,
- a digital lab,
- a hackathonChallenge and
- a crowdsourcing sprint
These sequential experimentations emphasised the value of cross-sectoral collaborations as a mean to address complex challenges faced by Ukrainian refugees. Hence, Web2Learn, as the leader of these experimentation series, adopted a holistic approach to scale up entrepreneurship potential to facilitate integration and self-agency of Ukrainian refugees into the host communities. Thus, the report provides a concrete overview of academia-business-driven innovation by showcasing solutions ideated by students, researchers, refugees and industry representatives. Moreover, Web2Learn assessed the competences and experiences developed in people involved in the academia-business actions through a survey whose results are presented in this report.
The report ends with an overview of challenges and opportunities observed during the implementation and evaluation of the four events, aiming to trigger further academia-business actions for refugee resilience.
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