THE LAPASSION PROJECT

LAPASSION (Latin-America Practices and Soft Skills for an Innovation Oriented Network) is a project from the program Erasmus. LAPASSION consortium has as motivation to create a unique solution to address different problems affecting youth in HEI, helping students to obtain a better training in terms of innovation, soft skills, and internationalization.

This solution is obtained by LAPASSION MP/I (Multidisciplinary Projects/Internships) for student’s 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).

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Multidisciplinary Projects and Internships, oriented for the development of new products or services, developed by teams of students with different backgrounds and from different countries, in which students co-create and co-develop projects proposed by enterprises and other organizations, and innovative ideas are accelerated corresponds to the main innovation of LAPASSION. This innovation will be integrated in the students’ curricula, namely as final projects or internships, giving origin to the new paradigm of “Passion-based Learning”.

An objective is to train students in the development of real-world projects, with the need to cooperate with other students from different areas and countries, to create the perfect environment to deal with the learning of soft skills, to respond to the needs of enterprises and other organizations, and to be able to innovate. The center is not placed with the focus to create new business, a startup or a spinoff, like it is done in incubators, but also in preparing students for existing enterprises or organizations oriented to global markets, giving them the ability to innovate in this context. Cooperation and collaboration between participants of the students’ teams are the key aspects, emphasized in the “co-creation and co-development” words.

Creativity and Innovation spirit does not appear from nothing. It must be experimented and trained, step-by-step, in the Program Curricula of students, not only by planned exercises, but mainly by challenges posed to students, and involving uncertainty and ambiguity.

While already existing in some Programmes, there is a trend to launch these challenges for homogeneous groups of students, from the same Programme, with the same background. LAPASSION argues that heterogeneous creation and development are essential to prepare future graduates. The impact on employment, creativity, productivity, innovation, and global thinking will be enormous.