Sixth session of the international BRIDGE project in St. Petersburg
Within the framework of the development of the flagship university of PetrSU and the international project ENI KO1013 “BRIDGE – The Barents Region Initiative for the Development of Economic Growth and Promotion of Employment”, the 6th session of student internships on solving business cases, organized by ITMO University in Saint Petersburg.
From 11 to 15 October, the sixth session of the BRIDGE international educational project “Barents Region Initiative for Developing Growth and Employability” is taking place at ITMO University (National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics) in St. Petersburg, in which 49 people take part: 30 students, of which 20 are Russian, 10 are foreign; 12 coaches, 4 of them from Russia, 8 from Finland and Norway, 7 commissioners from St. Petersburg.
The 3-year BRIDGE project is part of the CBC Kolarctic cross-border cooperation program 2014-2020. In addition to PetrSU, 4 partner universities are participating in the BRIDGE project: the Arctic University of Norway (lead partner), Lapland University of Applied Sciences (Finland), Murmansk Arctic State University and ITMO University (St. Petersburg).
In the 6th session of the BRIDGE project, cases are solved for 7 companies in St. Petersburg, all of them are marketing and related to the digital economy: Arcadia, Geoscan Group, Digital Design, Trip for students, Teachingame, Cofium, KORA. The cases are solved by 9 international interdisciplinary teams of students, since Teachingame and Cofium offered 2 tasks each. Case tasks are very diverse: from promoting drone shows, corporate information systems, an online store selling bouquets of flowers and training florists, developing a smart coffee shop brand, gamification in school education to developing digital solutions for the business-class travel industry, tours in Russia for foreign students.
The 6th session of BRIDGE is held in a mixed format – students from Murmansk and St. Petersburg and coaches work offline in the ITMO coworking space, other partners (PetrSU, UiT, LapinAMK) join online. Traditionally, colleagues from Finland Anitra Arkko-Saukkonen and Angelica Krastina, together with Norwegian colleague Matthew Lynch, give 4 trainings on the author’s method “Creative Steps” in order to unite teams and prepare intermediate and final presentations on cases using Padlet online boards. In addition, at the Workshop Week from October 11 to 15, the host university ITMO organized 3 informative lectures with invited lecturers-experts: Igor Kuprienko (with the topic “Project Management”), Natalia Lukovnikova (“Foresight”) and Anton Gopka (” Innovative Entrepreneurship “). The last lecturer is the Dean of the Faculty of Technological Management and Innovations at ITMO, a venture investor and general partner of the management company ATEM Capital, writes a column for Forbes.ru. Communication interaction within the 6th BRIDGE session is organized in the official Microsoft Teams platform.
As students solving cases from PetrSU, 5 students were selected: Andrey Chuvak (2nd year undergraduate student in Economics and Finance at the Institute of Economics and Law), Ekaterina Moseeva (4th year bachelor in Tourism direction) from the Institute of Physical culture, sports and tourism, Ilya Tkachuk (3rd year bachelor of the IEP in the direction of “Management”), Pavel Stafeev and Evgeny Plenkin (bachelors of the 3rd year of the IEP in the direction of “Economics”).
Students successfully passed the casting in English in order to freely communicate in international interdisciplinary groups when solving cases under the supervision of Associate Professor of the Department of Economic Theory and Management of the Institute of Economic Policy Oksana Nikolaevna Prokhorova.
During the week, the session participants met with managers of Russian companies from St. Petersburg to develop a team solution. As a result of the session, the teams will submit interim presentations on October 15 with an action plan for the next five weeks of online work. The final presentation will take place on November 24 via videoconference.