After Santiago de Chile, it was Porto's turn to host the mid-term meeting of the LAPASSION project with the presence of several international partners, namely Finland, Uruguay and Brazil.
LAPASSION (Latin-America Practices and Soft Skills for an Innovation Oriented Network) is a project from the program Erasmus+ within the line KA2 – Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices – Capacity Building in the field of Higher Education (reference 585687-EPP-1-2017-1-PT-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP). It involves partners from Portugal, Finland, Spain, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile. LAPASSION consortium has a motivation to create a unique solution to address different problems affecting youth in HEI, helping students to obtain better training in terms of innovation, soft skills, and internationalization. This solution is obtained by LAPASSION MP/I (Multidisciplinary Projects/Internships) for students’ teams to help them to co-create, and co-develop projects proposed by enterprises and other organizations, or to accelerate innovative ideas in an international context involving students from several countries).
The project manager, Carlos Ramos, is a professor at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) and researcher at the Research Group on Intelligent Systems in Engineering and Computing for Innovation and Development (GECAD).
Deans, coordinators, mentors, and teachers discussed for three days and analyzed the development of ongoing multidisciplinary projects. The sessions were held at ISEP and the Portuguese Business Association (AEP), one of the Portuguese partners.
This year, three lots of projects have already been presented in Brazil and in Uruguay. The typology of the program determines that during ten weeks the students are divided into groups, guided by teams from different institutions, developing multidisciplinary projects in order to respond to various challenges. "
The methodology applied to each project is design thinking, explains the coordinator of LAPASSION, noting that the program was created essentially with the goal of transporting "good practices" present in Europe to Latin America. Carlos Ramos highlights, as an example, the methodology of group work, "very developed in Europe, especially in multidisciplinary projects".
"HEI in Chile, Uruguay and Brazil started to introduce these good practices", he said, pointing out that in parallel there is a presentation of student projects: "In ten weeks we have seen very innovative results."
With an exemplary evaluation of the Erasmus program, Carlos Ramos considers the project to be very ambitious, "when we estimate the results, we see that the project has far surpassed the initial expectations."
