View from the World Port Center over the Maas river
The Open Innovation Master Elective is an annual class offered by ICCL faculty members at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, which runs as a full-time course over three months. The students work in close cooperation with an external company and develop solutions to this company's challenges in the area of Innovation Management, with a focus on Open Innovation. The participants are MSc students in their last study year.
Dr Daan Stam, introducing the presentations
This year, the Port of Rotterdam provided the challenges for the students to work on. Over the past three months, the students have been working on these challenges in small groups, analyzing corporate documents, interviewing managers and employees of the Port Authority as well as some of the companies located in the harbor. Each of the teams developed solutions to their specific challenge which they presented on Wednesday to three representatives of the Port of Rotterdam's strategy department.
Port of Rotterdam representatives discussing with the presenters
The winning presentation
The winning team, consisting of four students, created a new concept for innovation collaboration between the Port Authority and the more than 1,000 companies located in the Port of Rotterdam, which is the fourth-biggest harbor in the world. They used the analogy of a beehive to explain their ideas and delivered a refreshing presentation. The jury, consisting of three representatives of the Port Authority and Dr. Daan Stam, ICCL, liked both the concepts and the presentation skills of these students the best. The other three teams also delivered convincing analyses and innovative solutions to the challenges they had been working on.
The winning team
Caroline Kroes, Corporate Strategy Advisor at the Port of Rotterdam Authority, was very pleased with the results of the course. "The teams have done a great job, and I am sure some of their ideas will be discussed in more detail within our department and have a good chance to be implemented in the company. We are very happy with the results."
Caroline Kroes, announcing the winning team
