2022

Innovation Project 2022

Innovation for Inspiration - (Johannes Vögerl, Eric Strauch)

Climate change, the pandemic, increased scarcity of resources and planetary boundaries: Coping with recent and future challenges does not only require political and social support but also disruptive technological innovations.

With the aim to inspire future generations to engage in engineering tomorrow’s solutions, this year’s task for the innovation project is to provide innovative engineering kits to young and curious minds. Starting with the assembly of an easily expandable system teenagers may dive into the fascinating world of technology and get inspired to one day become engineers.

103 undergraduate student teams compete in developing engineering kits attributed to one of three categories with different levels of system complexity and constraints:

Domino Robot
With a special focus on the technical challenge, teams design a system capable of placing and triggering the fall of domino patterns.

Mechanical Animal
Teams with a focus on combining creativity with a technical challenge task themselves with developing a mechanical animal capable of a characteristic animal movement of their choosing.

Wild Category
Teams in the Wild Category have the total freedom to decide on the system they want to build. With virtually no creative limitation students face not only the challenge of how to implement the desired capabilities but also deciding what functions to pursue.

Agile Development and pd|z Principles

Accompanied by the concept-based lecture Innovation Process the innovation project allows students to apply agile product development principles in a creative competitive yet guided environment. Integrating elements from Scrum and Kanban into their work, the teams work in biweekly sprint cycles at the end of which they present and reflect on their interim-results.

To support the Innovation Project teams, 40 senior mechanical engineering students are specifically trained within the lecture Coaching Innovation Projects to coach engineering teams. With the help of various principles for product development, the coaches guide the students through the sprints and iterations of the agile product development process. The foundation for these principles comprises carefully selected practices ensuing research performed by the pd|z.

Awards

To determine this year’s finalists, the student teams present performance and assembly videos of their innovative systems. In the final on the 24th of May 2022 selected teams promote their systems on stage, followed by a jury vote to determine the winners in the respective categories. The winning teams will present and promote their system on the 31st of May at the Focus Roll-out 2022.

To round-off the product development journey, all student teams continuously promote their systems throughout the creative process complemented by a small social media campaign for their final system. Get inspired and browse through countless #innoprojekt22 posts on external pageInstagramcall_made.