So picture the scene – you are a university student and have decided to go on an internship abroad. Recognising that most business is accounted for by small and medium sized companies (SMEs) you decide to apply to a SME for your internship. Almost immediately you have a problem because you don’t know what SMEs there are in your target country. So maybe you’ll target a big company anyway. At least you know how to look up Siemens and Maersk!
But you are the determined type so you persist and with the help of the university placements office you finally get an internship with a small company which is, say, at the leading edge of mobile app development for the disabled. Now one of the reasons you wanted to target an SME in the first place was so that you could get a real taste of what it is to be an entrepreneur. Now you have your chance because the two founders of the company are always at the weekly development meeting unless they’re attending trade exhibitions or meeting clients. So… what do you do now? Of course they give you tasks to do and these are quite interesting but how do you get more out of the experience and really find out what the entrepreneurial spirit is all about?
Maybe one way of really adding value to the organisation is to come with something in your pocket? How about visiting the university technology transfer department before you leave and see if there is anything there which might be of interest to your hosting company. But aren’t those patents pending all confidential? Can you really start discussing them with your host internship company?
It is this type of situation which the newly started Uni-Key project would like to address by encouraging responsible technology transfer through interns and by developing some short targeted online training which will highlight to the intern opportunities for learning more about entrepreneurial skills. The training will be built around key situations such as the one described above. The project partners have come up with the list below of possible key situations which could be turned into training activities.
- planning situations turned into a strategic (career) planning exercise
- financial shortage situations turned into a financial planning exercise (including forms of micro-financing, crowdfunding)
- (intercultural) conflict situations turned into an innovation and creativity management exercise
- boundary crossing situations turned into a strategic self-development exercise
- confidentiality situations turned into IPR management exercises
- underchallenge situations turned into exercises of opportunity seizing (e.g. concerning knowledge transfer)
- situations requiring self-organisation turned into exercises of self- and project management
- ethically challenging situations turned into exercises of reflection on good governance
But we would like to know if there are any other key situations which would be good candidates for inclusion in the training. Although I am the partner in the project responsible for quality assurance, we are all involved in these preliminary discussions which will determine how relevant our final version of the training is.
We would be very interested to hear from interested parties whether they could add to the list. So have you hosted interns before in your organisation? Were there any issues which tended to surface time and time again? Could we use them as one of the key situations in our training? We’d love to know what you think of the list.