student projects

initiation

AnyIdea is suitable for use in a wide range of applications. In the two cases below, you can read how you can specifically use AnyIdea for student projects.

AnyIdea and the relevance of open innovation

Open innovation is currently more relevant than ever, as the pressure on organizations and companies to innovate is increasing. This pressure is caused by globalization and digitization, shorter product life cycles, rapid market developments and general uncertainties. But social networks are also contributing to open innovation and similar models becoming increasingly popular.

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

AnyIdea as a SaaS platform enables interdisciplinary collaboration to bring in other perspectives and thus enable open innovation as well as asynchronous collaboration when generating ideas. Projects that require the integration of people into the problem-solving process are carried out faster, more organized and more resource-efficient with AnyIdea. Projects that take place in collaboration with a company often require the identification of customer or user needs through surveys or interviews. As a digital tool, AnyIdea also exceeds spatial restrictions.

example 1

A student project as part of a lecture

As a student at a university, university of applied sciences or academia, you have to do countless group assignments: These usually involve seminar papers and presentations. This case involves six students in the Business Model Innovation course who work together on a project including presentation and business model. More specifically, the task is to think of a fictitious or real company and invent an innovative product or service. To this end, a comprehensive business model will be written down and presented to fictitious investors as part of the lecture. Students must meet outside of study time to work on the project. The professors only work part-time at the university 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. Accordingly, a group of six students brings together many different ideas and opinions. It is often difficult to agree on an idea for follow-up within the group.

With a campaign in AnyIdea, all ideas are collected as a first step. The campaign can be designed completely openly by the students, or they can jointly define specific subject areas on which the ideas should be based.

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

At this point, all participants in the campaign, including external parties in particular, should be invited to like and comment on ideas. This is supported by AnyIdea's automated communication. As a result of the number of likes and comments, there are initial tendencies and this is how the pool of ideas is sharpened even further.

Now is the time to evaluate the most promising ideas. For now, evaluation is reserved for campaign members, in this case the six students in the group. Thanks to AnyIdea's flexibility, however, other evaluators can also be invited as required, such as the professors from the lecture, who can thus incorporate their expertise. They evaluate the ideas according to individually defined criteria, such as the degree of innovation and implementation costs. All evaluated ideas are visualized in a portfolio.

The top ideas are then derived from this. After an exchange and coordination between the group, one of the top ideas is selected and a business model is developed. AnyIdea also supports this 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 industry are part of the curriculum at practice-oriented universities. For a project in collaboration with a company, customers should be interviewed in this case. AnyIdea is ideal so that many people from different countries can be interviewed. With the resulting results, the company wants to strengthen its customer loyalty. At the same time, projects of this kind, as they have a customer-focused and innovative character, create a good image and show the openness of the company. This in turn influences corporate culture. The project group in this case consists of seven students from two study programs 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 will be asked which customer retention measures they 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 start brainstorming and also with the preparation of a schedule for the entire semester. The framework conditions are defined, smart goals are defined and questions for the campaigns are developed in AnyIdea. Both campaigns are aimed at German-speaking customers.

The first campaign describes why feedback from customers is sought after. The campaign description also contains various orientation questions, which should be answered. The aim is for the interviewees to tell what they like about the brand and what they don't like and they should report on other experiences and impressions. The focus of this method is primarily on quality and not on quantity and individual experiences with the company and the brand. By deciding which customers to invite to the campaign and the opportunity to invite new customers over and over again, control and evaluation always remains with the seven students.

In a second, public campaign, all customers are really in demand; quantity is focused. This was created on the basis of the first campaign. The link to the campaign is distributed on social networks and in the company's newsletter. The aim of the following campaign is to collect ideas and approaches for customer loyalty measures. And who has better ideas than the customers themselves! As a result, the campaign is very open and offers plenty of leeway.

The ideas of the second campaign are constantly being evaluated by seven students and two managers from the company. Since countless ideas have been received, the two professors are invited as evaluators to help evaluate the ideas. This campaign then results in the top ideas, which are translated into innovative projects.

These can now be comprehensively developed by the project team in order to derive recommendations for measures and present them. AnyIdea's visualization options, e.g. with the portfolio of ideas, make high-quality images available for a presentation.

The benefits 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 doesn't matter: From a small student project (seminar) to an extensive corporate project (master).
• As part of projects, AnyIdea connects students, colleagues, employees, professors and experts to generate and evaluate ideas, solutions and feedback.
• As a digital solution, the powerful platform enables collaboration regardless of location and time. — A necessity for efficient implementation of projects, not only, but especially in times of social distancing and home office.
• As a SaaS solution, ready to use in just a few minutes, easy to use, clear and transparent.
• Free for students and universities.

conclusion

AnyIdea provides efficient project work support for students whenever ideas, solutions and feedback are sought. The digital solution is immediately ready for use, and the university and students do not incur any costs for using AnyIdea. Offer this service to your students too!