Needs Led PhD Crash Course: Aligning your PhD Work with Market Needs

Needs Led PhD Crash Course equips PhD students with the tools needed to go from PhD idea to real impact within your field of work. You will develop practical skills to generate innovative solutions for the betterment of the state of the art while broadening your network to take your idea to the next level.

Needs Led PhD Course

These 3 hours crash course is developed by University of Coimbra – Instituto de Investigação Interdisciplinar which aims to give participants a basic knowledge on how to align PhD research topics with market or societal challenges in order to increase the probability of greater impact in society. The program participants will receive coaching and training throughout the session related with Needs Led innovation methodology and how to use that information to fine tune the scope of their PhD research. The course facilitator have several years experience on delivering Needs Led Innovation European programs in healthcare and will guide you through topics such as market need identification and validation; solution concept generation and validation.

During the participants will get the opportunity to network with like-minded PhD students and use their network on behalf of your work.

At the end of the day, the participants will have a clear understanding of the requirements for developing their research work within their field of expertise in order to maximize societal/market impact.

Who should apply?

Any University of Coimbra PhD Student is more than welcome to participate on this initiative. Nevertheless, it is important to say that:

• The course is not aimed to teach entrepreneurship skills to PhD Students (although it could be a first step on that direction…)
• The course is not about fundamental research and how to achieve high scientific impact with your research

The course was designed taking into account that most PhD students want to generate a real impact on society with their work (being in terms of creating a new process, methodology which will be broadly used by the society, organizations or citizens).

Application process

In order to be eligible to apply you need to:

• be a PhD student at UC
• be able to attend the course (January 21^st 2022 from 2h30pm to 5h30pm)

There is a limited number of seats and a first come first served policy will be used.

In case of any questions, contact internationalnetworks@uc.pt