UNIC (English version)

Last week (3-9 November) was a week packed with professional events and activities. One of these events was the Working Conference held on the 4th, 5th and 6th at the University of Deusto as part of the UNIC alliance, in which I was able to actively participate.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, UNIC (European University of Cities in Post-Industrial Transition) is a European alliance that was created in 2020 and is part of the European Commission’s European Universities Initiative. It is made up of 10 universities whose main objective is to develop innovation for inclusive and super-diverse higher education, and city-university cooperation for greater social and community impact.

UNIC has 7 thematic lines (TL) and 6 work packages (WP), which are led by one or more universities in the alliance and include representatives from all the universities in the alliance.

In my case, I am working with an interdisciplinary and inter-university team of creative and innovative individuals to promote equally innovative approaches to teaching, learning and mobility, especially virtual mobility, among teachers and students. For me, this is an eminently entrepreneurial endeavour in which, every time we meet (at least once a month), we try to work towards innovative education by generating ideas that help us move forward in an increasingly complex society.

Through the WP I collaborate with, we have created the UNIC CTL Teaching and Learning Centre, which encompasses key units for teaching, learning and mobility. Our goal is to consolidate the work done in previous years and deepen institutional collaboration for greater sustainability, innovation and shared resources. At the CTL, we design training courses and educational materials, and propose spaces for the promotion of educational innovation.

During the Working Conference, we had the opportunity to explore how colleagues from the other nine universities perceive educational innovation within the alliance. To do this, our WP prepared a world café to stimulate an activity that gave us some clues to continue our work.

Today, I would also like to highlight the opportunity I had to exchange opinions, points of view and, of course, business cards (yes, the traditional kind) with colleagues from the Universities of Koc (Turkey), Cork (Ireland), Erasmus (Netherlands), Ruhr University Bochum (Germany), Malmö (Sweden) and Zagreb (Croatia). All of them make proposals on entrepreneurial education, each from their own post-industrial and diverse contexts and possibilities. For me, it was a unique opportunity to be able to share with people from so many different universities who have something in common, which is a commitment to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial people. So today, without a doubt, the UNIC alliance deserves a space in this blog!

“Hacia el sur” (English version) (Southward)

The person I introduce you today is special for many aspects. Many of them are related to entrepreneurship and her powerful professionalism, but there are many others that, without being typical of an entrepreneur and without any doubt, are part of her added value. Her name is Ro Venegas and she is the CEO, image, soul and smile of Hacia el Sur (southwards), her dream project.

If you are interested in getting to know a person who defines herself as cheerful, social, extroverted, but serious and hard-working, and whose objectives include personal and professional growth by working with creative people who are capable of building things out of nothing to make people’s lives more entertaining, you just have to keep reading. (more…)

BBF

A few weeks ago, on 28 February, I received an invitation to take part in a participatory meeting at Bilbao Berrikuntza Faktoria (BBF). The message was clear: I was invited as a key agent of innovation to, together with other people, promote the innovative ecosystem of Bizkaia. The idea was to bring together “a fundamental part of the current innovation network and the inhabitants of the BBF to understand how to take care of this ecosystem that gives us life and decide what steps we can take together”. Of course, I went there, after all, it is “my topic” and if I could contribute something, it was one of those moments I couldn’t miss. (more…)