ABSTRACT
Innovation has the potential to propel organizations to unprecedented levels of performance and to strengthen their competitive advantage. Collaboration plays a significant role in boosting the innovation capabilities and reaching performance goals. Improving collaboration brings substantial overall benefits ranging from faster internal decision making, reduced costs through shared resources, and the development of more innovative products. The COViD-10 outbreak has radically altered traditional collaboration and teamwork patterns, requiring new approaches that would nurture creativity, engagement, and motivation at team level, and that would also streamline decision-making processes. This paper investigates the use of a collaborative platform that can enhance teamwork achievements and decision-making capabilities and presents an analysis of experiments carried out within software research projects. The approach considers key challenges in today's global and fast-changing research and business environments that demand improvements in collaboration among functions ranging from R&D to distribution. The authors explore techniques for improving the effectiveness of teams, capitalizing on the promises of cutting-edge software and the applicability of the Design Thinking methodology and its potential to boost collaboration. This research probes the capacity of technology to support team performance and better decision-making processes. © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
ABSTRACT
The VIE (Virtual presence in higher education hybrid learning environments) is an Erasmus+ project which was approved in the extraordinary call during the COVID pandemic to support digital education readiness and collaborative skills. This project is aimed to design and implement a highly interactive digital collaborative learning platform. VIE envisions a digital work environment through which students will design solutions to learning challenges through brainstorming and synthesizing by building on each other's ideas. The VIE solution will simulate the way that students work together in a classroom towards design solution by taking notes on a common blackboard that all can see and update at the same time. The service functionality will include: avatar presence through which participants will be able to recognize their team members in the digital environment;sharing of ideas in the form of building blocks that all can see, review, edit, and combine simultaneously towards building a larger solution from smaller contributions;and project organization that allows the effective management and prioritization of tasks in a visual and engaging manner. Interaction will be supported through both desktop and mobile devices for maximizing access flexibility. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
HERA is an Erasmus+ project aimed at the development of soft skills in higher education engineering and economics students through collaborative serious games. It proposes a digital learning game platform whose goal is to expose students to complex challenges, the solution to which requires integration of knowledge from diverse fields in a manner that simulates how engineering and economics professionals work and collaborate in the real world. The platform shows the typical landscape of a virtual city game, like SimCity, where it is possible to perform different actions to develop a city in an appropriate and suitable way. Available scenarios involve problems related to sustainable mobility, smart parking solutions, circular economy related to recycling, flood management, e-commerce development, Olympic Games management and even COVID. Gamifying the problem-solving process will promote active student engagement in learning through a sense of mission, a sense of affiliation, healthy competition, rewards, and social recognition by peers among other mechanisms. © 2021 IEEE.