REIMAGINE NEWSLETTER: ISSUE 15
A RELIEF APPEAL: TEC’S SPIRIT OF RESILIENCE
How the 4th Industrial Revolution is impacting the public & private sector
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing the way we live, work and think. It’s bringing with it the rapid advancement of technologies, especially those related to advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. As technology becomes invisible it shapes the lives of young adults and workers across the globe, erasing borders and allowing people to work from anywhere. Work is no longer a place you go, and requires interdisciplinary thinkers that can be creative, think critically and solve problems as they arise. These are just some of the top 10 skills the World Economic Forum has identified as being essential for success over the next decade. The 4th industrial revolution is here to stay.
Technologies like smartphones, 3G/4G/wifi and high-speed internet, combined with cloud computing has made it easier for organizations to create diverse cross-functional teams that are co-located and creating together across the globe. By 2020, the concept of technology companies will disappear as technology becomes ingrained as part of the DNA of how every successful organization operates. If agility, efficiency and augmented intelligence with your own data is not part of how you create value for your customers and users, chances are you’re falling behind the next wave of breakthroughs within your industry.
Private & public sector: tackling the challenge
It’s important to understand how the evolution of technology creates opportunities and implications on how industry and markets operate and evolve. Recently, we ran a collaborative innovation event bringing both private and public sector together to identify some of these challenges and begin to conceptualize ideas to address them. The biggest lesson learned from the think tank session was the importance of ensuring that clear pathways are drawn to put research and development into practice. Higher education institutions need to think ahead and establish purpose-driven collaborative partnership opportunities with industry in order to share challenges, ideas and co-create solutions to real-world challenges.
The Skills Gap
As the need for the future skills economy evolves to become more interdisciplinary with critical soft skills becoming essential, organizations will need to adopt a new approach to learning. The public sector needs to consider how to better prepare students for future work-integration based on the skills-of-the-future today.
Higher education and organizations both need to prepare the next generation for the mindset of lifelong learning. Lifelong learning can take many forms including attending events such as conferences, team workshops, innovation challenges, as well as taking skills courses and certifications.
This shift also needs to take into account how we assess a prospective employee’s qualifications. No longer is a degree sufficient, now the future employer will recognize the individual’s portfolio of work, which may include startup pitches, code projects or creative designs that can take on many forms from data visualizations to illustrations.
How Prepr Solves this with PIE®
Prepr started to explore the cross-sections between open education and open innovation in 2011. After two years of initial field research between interviewing students, professors and private-sector professionals, combined with quantitative statistics on high attrition rates between MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) registrations-to-completions and hackathon-to-startup conversions, we realized a gap and there, PIE® was born.
PIE®; is an interdisciplinary problem solving framework; a 3-phase method combining project leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship in order to build agile teams, taking ideas to market in 15 steps, under 90 days.
Today, Prepr comprises of changemakers, collaborators, and growth engineers from both public and private sector. Prepr is building a global lab network connecting entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, & educators to co-LEARN, co-LAB, & co-SOLVE™ real-work challenges and create business opportunities.
The PIE® Program has been designed to be used as a common process or method to co-Lab between private and public sectors. PIE® is designed to work best for individuals who want to create a startup, participate in a hackathon, join an innovation challenge or are part of a project team working through a specific problem with boundaries.
Learn more about how you can be part of the solution…
PIE® is released as an open-source initiative by Prepr with over 126 co-creators involved in the design and evolution of the methodology. We collaborate with higher education institutions to carry out impact studies on student-to-workforce success and project portfolio development to showcase their skills to future employers.
To learn more about specific ways your organization or higher-ed institution can co-Lab with us, register your interest here and a member of our lab team will reach out to you shortly.
Connect with us:
On Twitter: @preprme
On LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salarchagpar/
Via Email: [email protected]