Professor Rafael Prikladnicki went to Kogod School of Business to develop institutional partnerships
Tecnopuc’s diretor visited the Kogod School of Business. Photos: Personal archive
School of Technology professor and director of the Science and Technology Park of PUCRS (Tecnopuc), Dr Rafael Prikladnicki, has just returned from a mission at American University, in the US, under PUCRS-PrInt. He went to the Kogod School of Business at American University under the cooperation project Technology and Society in a globalized world in crisis, coordinated by Prof. Ingo Wolfgang Sarlet, under the priority theme World in Motion: Individuals and Society.
Prikladnicki discussed opportunities for collaboration in different areas, including academic research and the institution’s business incubator. The partnership between American University and PUCRS has been around since 2009. Collaborative projects involving Professor Erran Carmel, a reference in the area of technology globalization, are some of the highlights of this partnership.
In 2009, both institutions began working on a joint investigation on the role of Brazil in the globalization of information technology. This research resulted in an article written by researchers from the two universities. In 2010, Carmel visited PUCRS for the first time. From 2014 to 2017, a project on crowdsourcing in software development made it possible for Carmel to come to PUCRS on several occasions. It also allowed for students and faculty in the Graduate Program in Computer Science (PPGCC) to visit American University. In 2018, they began a project on innovation and entrepreneurship and future of work. In this particular case, they focused on the development of software startups.
“Since then, we have been talking and trying to increase the scope of the collaboration, which until then was just about joint research. Now we are looking to exchange experiences among innovation environments and mobility of entrepreneurship and innovation students. We are also discussing a double degree program”, Prikladnicki says.
Prikadnicki with Bill Bellows, responsible for the American University Business Incubator.
The collaboration with American University, with the direct involvement of Erran Carmel, has produced several significant results for PUCRS. This mission is intended to help the institutions consolidate this partnership even more, as they will set clearer goals and evaluate the results achieved so far.
The PUCRS professor also attended the Agile Conference, the largest international conference on agile methodologies. At the conference, Prikladnicki coordinated a session on the future of agility and presented the partnership between the School of Technology, the Innovation Center and ThoughtWorks, a Tecnopuc-based company. “The project called Agile Accelerator has been in existence for 8 years and involves additional training for technology students using agile methodologies”, he says. The paper presented focused on the practices of Acceleradora Inclusiva at PUCRS. This incubator is an extension to the agile accelerator that kicked off in 2018 and which focused on technological education for the socially vulnerable youth.
