Student projects

Introduction

AnyIdea is suitable for use in a wide range of applications. You can read about how AnyIdea can be used for student projects in the following two cases.

AnyIdea and the relevance of Open Innovation

Open Innovation is currently more relevant than ever, as the pressure to innovate is increasing on organisations and companies. This pressure comes from globalisation and digitalisation, shorter product life cycles, fast-moving markets and general uncertainties. But social networks are also contributing to the increasing popularity of open innovation and similar models.

AnyIdea takes up the principle of Open Innovation. Open Innovation as a concept was originally developed by Henry Chesbrough. He defines open innovation as the opening of the innovation process to the outside world in order to integrate colleagues, customers, partners or experts, for example. Through so-called crowdsourcing or co-creation, the ideas, opinions and special knowledge of external parties are included.

AnyIdea as a SaaS platform enables interdisciplinary collaboration to bring in other perspectives and thus enable Open Innovation as well as asynchronous collaboration in idea generation. Projects that require the integration of people into the problem-solving process are carried out faster, in a more organised and resource-efficient way with AnyIdea. Projects that involve collaboration with a business often require the identification of customer or user needs via surveys or interviews. As a digital tool, AnyIdea also breaks spatial restrictions.

Example 1

A student project within the framework of a lecture

As a student at a university, university of applied sciences or academy, you are confronted with countless group assignments: Most of them are seminar papers and presentations. In this case, six students in the Business Model Innovation lecture are working together on a project including a presentation and a business model. More precisely, the task is to think of a fictitious or real company and invent an innovative product or service. To do this, a comprehensive business model is to be written down and presented to fictitious investors during the lecture. Students must meet outside of class time to work on the project. The professors are only at the university part-time and therefore only on site at certain times.

The course of the study project with AnyIdea

Many projects like this start with a brainstorming session. In a group of six students, many different ideas and opinions come together. It is often difficult for the group to agree on an idea to follow up.

With a campaign in AnyIdea, all ideas are collected in a first step. The campaign can be designed quite openly by the students, or certain topics are defined together, on which the ideas are to be oriented.

In the campaign created, not only the six students themselves can send their ideas, but also external people can be involved in the process of generating ideas. They can easily invite fellow students or even friends and acquaintances to send ideas.

At this point, all participants in the campaign, including especially the externals, should be encouraged to like and comment on ideas. This is supported by the automated communication of AnyIdea. Subsequently, the number of likes and comments will give rise to initial tendencies and thus the pool of ideas will be further sharpened.

Now it is time to evaluate the most promising ideas. For the time being, the evaluation is reserved for the campaign members, here the six students of the group. Thanks to the flexibility of AnyIdea, however, other evaluators can be invited as needed, such as the professors of the lecture, who can thus contribute their expertise. They evaluate the ideas according to individually defined criteria, e.g. degree of innovation and implementation effort. All evaluated ideas are visualised in a portfolio.

The top ideas then emerge from this. After the group has exchanged and voted, one of the top ideas is selected and a business model is developed. AnyIdea also supports this process as a transparent collaboration tool to achieve the defined project goals.

Example 2

A student project in collaboration with a company

In addition to seminar papers, projects in cooperation with companies from the economy are part of the curriculum at practice-oriented universities. For a project in cooperation with a company, customers are to be interviewed in this case. AnyIdea is a good choice so that many people from different countries can be interviewed. The company wants to use the results to strengthen its customer loyalty. At the same time, projects of this kind, because they have a customer-centred and innovative character, create a good image and show the openness of the company. This in turn influences the corporate culture. The project group in this case consists of seven students from two degree programmes with two professors. The task of the students is now to develop a concept with new ideas that strengthen customer loyalty. On the one hand, the company's customers from the DACH region are to be asked which customer loyalty measures they have noticed, what they found good or bad and what measures they would like to see.

The course of the study project with AnyIdea

Here, the seven students begin with a brainstorming session and also with the creation of a schedule for the entire semester. The framework conditions are determined, smart goals defined and questions developed for the campaigns in AnyIdea. Both campaigns are aimed at German-speaking customers.

The first campaign describes why feedback from clients is needed. Also in the campaign description, different questions are given for orientation, which are to be answered. The aim is for the respondents to tell what they like about the brand, what they don't like and to tell about other experiences and impressions. The focus of this method is primarily on quality rather than quantity and the individual experiences with the company and the brand. By deciding which customers are invited to the campaign and the possibility to invite new customers again and again, the control as well as the evaluation always remains with the seven students.

In a second, public campaign, all customers are really asked, quantity is focused. This was created on the basis of the first campaign. The link to the campaign is distributed in social networks and in the company newsletter. The aim of the subsequent campaign is to collect ideas and approaches for customer loyalty measures. And who has better ideas than the customers themselves! This makes the campaign very open and offers a lot of room for manoeuvre.

The ideas of the second campaign are continuously evaluated by the seven students and two responsible persons from the company. Since countless ideas were received, the two professors were invited as evaluators to support the evaluation of the ideas. Afterwards, the top ideas emerge in this campaign, which are transferred into innovation projects.

These can now be comprehensively elaborated by the project team in order to derive recommendations for measures and present them. Thanks to AnyIdea's visualisation options, e.g. with the idea portfolio, qualitative image material is available for a presentation.

The advantages of AnyIdea for study projects

• AnyIdea can be used for student projects from a wide range of disciplines and is suitable for almost any topic: AnyIdea provides support whenever ideas are needed!
• The size of the project does not matter: from a small student project (seminar) to an extensive company project (Master).
• AnyIdea networks students, colleagues, staff, professors and experts within the framework of projects to generate and evaluate ideas, approaches and feedback.
• As a digital solution, the powerful platform enables collaboration independent of time and place. - Not only, but especially in times of social distancing and home offices, this is a necessity for efficient project implementation.
• As a SaaS solution, it is ready to use in just a few minutes, easy to operate, clear and transparent.
• Free of charge for students and universities.

Conclusion

AnyIdea offers efficient support in project work for students whenever ideas, approaches and feedback are needed. The digital solution is ready to use immediately and there are no costs for the university or the students for using AnyIdea. You too can offer this service to your students!