The UCITYLAB pilot programme in Paris was implemented in the form of three different challenges wich involved three different sets of partnerships.
For the first challenge the Institut Mines-Télécom Business School (IMTBS) partnered with the municipality of Évry-Courcouronnes. The aim was to challenge the SEED Entrepreneurship Students to develop solutions for repositioning the City of Évry-Courcouronnes as a liveable and attractive city. 16 concepts were developed an presented to the Council Members; among those, two ideas have been followed up by the municipality to engage the students in further work and one of those concepts is now being taken forward by one of the founder teams.
The second challenge had as a goal to investigate the potential for co-working in the Essonne Region. This time IMTBS collaborated with Essonne Developpement, a regional accelerator to launch a course in which 102 students were involved in addressing the following question: “What is the development potential for co-working in Essonne?”. During the course, 3 workshops were hosted exploring the topic using a social research approach that included immersions, scan cards, videos, a State of the Market report, interviews and case studies.
Lastly, the third challenge that IMTBS implemented revolved around the idea of Creating the Museum of the Future. The main partners who collaborated to the implementation of this challenge were the City of Ghent and Gentrepreneur, an initiative that helps students in Ghent to be more entrepreneurial. This challenge involved an international mix of students comprised of 22 students from the SEED Entrepreneurship major programme at IMTBS and 13 students from the University of Adelaide (Australia). The Gent City Council posed two questions: (1) How can we make museums more interactive and connected to student life, and (2) How to get entrepreneur networks working better. At the end of the challenge, two ideas were identified by Gentrepreneur for further development.
