The department will continue and expand its activities with local companies to facilitate contacts between students, researchers, and industry. And we will engage in more local research focused events with industry and business participation, such as our successful Aarhus University Digital Innovation Festival and the 2024 MatchPoints conference on Cyber Security.
We will strengthen our engagement in national and international networks and activities aimed at knowledge transfer to industry, such as EDIH, Digital Lead, DIREC etc.
The CS Business Club serves as an entry point for companies to scientific staff and students at the department, facilitating the creation of new industry research projects, student recruitment, and establishment of strategic partnerships.
During the strategy period, we will expand the portfolio of companies that CS collaborates with, using the strong connections with the local businesses (including members of CS business club) as a platform for establishing collaborative research projects. Specifically, we are planning to work on a possibility to provide industry collaboration mentorships for relevant junior VIP. And, to develop a scheme to facilitate student projects in collaboration with companies as part of their studies, including a platform for matching students and companies.
The department will participate actively in societal initiatives that need our competences and can increase our relevance for the Danish Society. Currently we are involved in a number of such initiatives:
The list is not comprehensive. The initiatives are many and new initiatives are continually formed and so, we may have to prioritize our involvement given the number of senior faculty members.
We have a well-established environment for creating a student entrepreneurial culture at the department, providing a physical space and light weight mentoring program for students and newly graduates that wish to establish a start-up company. This local environment is supported by a close collaboration with the AU innovation support function, providing consulting as well as physical facilities in The Kitchen. We wish to strengthen this collaboration as well as the collaboration with the local Aarhus accelerator environments, such as INCUBA, Stibo Accelerator etc.
We will also give priority to promote a start-up mindset among the students as well as faculty and provide courses on entrepreneurship for master’s and PhD students.
To achieve more societal collaboration, it is important that more faculty members develop an interest in business networks and become confident in dealing with the challenges of e.g. establishing strategic and industrial project collaborations or industry targeted courses and master class activities. In particular, younger faculty members and international faculty members may need more supervision on such activities. Finally, we note that working with international companies and organizations, e.g. in EU projects is also considered valuable societal collaboration, i.e. we think society at large.
Run workshop series to upskill interested faculty members in societal collaboration
