Abstract:

The School of Mines and Energy of the Technical University of Madrid is working on the transformation of an educational laboratory on Mining Technology to develop an Innovative Lab in this field. This is one of the first experiences oriented to education and training undergraduate and MSc students because the existing facilities of this kind all around the world are almost oriented for research and only accessible to doctoral students.

The Innovative Lab for students is being developed by creating a space devoted to the development of their technical and entrepreneurial skills. Moreover, in these spaces, the use and integration of new tools and technologies will help to educate the future professionals who will develop their activity within the 4th industrial revolution, in which the mining industry will tremendously evolve, giving place to “smart mining factories” with cyber-physical mining systems. This will be translated in a completely new way to interact among computers, automatic systems, robotics, and humans.

To truly innovate, companies need to ensure a culture that supports new ideas and new ways of doing business efforts, but also execute those ideas. The Innovative Lab will contribute to providing the training of the students who will become the workforce that will integrate technologies, develop new ideas and execute those projects. The Innovative Lab is the bridge from innovative thinking to execution, encouraging a culture of continuous improvement through empowerment of this future workforce.

This paper describes how this education project is being developed with the support of the EIT Raw Materials, one of the six Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) initiated by the EIT (European Institute of Innovation and Technology), and funded by the European Commission, that has the mission of contributing to boost competitiveness, growth, and attractiveness of the European raw materials sector via radical innovation and guided entrepreneurship. This project is aligned with the idea of the EIT Raw Materials that to reach the vision of generating a significant impact on European competitiveness and employment by driving and promoting innovation and empowering students, a new generation of skilled people entering the industry, universities, and research needs to be developed.

Keywords:

Faculty development, Program development, Engineering studies, Innovation, entrepreneurship skills, Innovative Lab.