Abstract:

This paper describes a collaborative network of universities organizing and offering a summer school course in higher education. It is based on descriptive single-case study. The course is a master’s course called CERN Bootcamp and it is part of EU-funded ATTRACT phase 2 program. The central collaborating organizations of the network include four higher education institutions from Helsinki area Finland, and they are Laurea University of Applied Sciences, which functions as a coordinator, Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, and the University of Helsinki HIP Helsinki Institute of Physics. Moreover, the network includes CERN IdeasSquare innovation and experimentation unit in Geneva Switzerland, and a higher education institution from Delft Netherlands and from Barcelona Spain. As a result, this papers describes the central activities, resources, and actors of the network.

The course CERN Bootcamp follows the pedagogic idea of challenge-based innovation (CBI). It draws on design thinking methods, which facilitate discovery, designing, and delivery in an innovation process. Around 25 master’s students are selected to the course CERN Bootcamp from the above-mentioned Finnish higher educational institutions. In the course, the students develop solutions to societal challenges related to United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDG). This happens in terms of challenge-based innovation at CERN IdeaSquare innovation and experimentation space. They first work in Finland 3 months and make preparatory data collection and literature analysis related to their specific development challenges. Then, they spend one week at CERN IdeaSquare Geneva and make an intensive co-creative development sprint. This includes collecting and analyzing data from experts, developing the solution, rapid prototyping, and presenting the solution.

This article briefly reviews the literature of interorganizational networks and ARA model. ARA refers to activities, resources, and actors within the network. The ARA model is used as a framework for the empirical case description. ARA-framework is a popular and widely used framework for analyzing and describing the nature of collaborative networks between organizations. This paper applies the ARA farmwork for describing the focal network organizing and offering the CERN Bootcamp summer school for master’s students.

First, this paper explains the background of the paper. Then, it reviews the literature on collaborative networks. After that, it provides a case description by describing the central activities, resources, and actors of the focal collaborative university network. Finally, it draws the conclusions.

Keywords:

Higher education, university collaboration, networks, summer school, master’s education.