UoA Graduate Students Participate in Intensive Training Camp for Regional Contribution

Over five days from Monday, August 17 to Friday, August 21, 2015, a five-day intensive training camp called " Practice of Service Business Design" was hosted by enPiT in Hakodate, Hokkaido. It was attended by graduate students from Doshisha University, Future University Hakodate, Muroran Institute of Technology, and the University of Aizu. This year's theme was "Let's Design Business Plans in Hakodate!" The There, pparticipants proposed innovative IT-based business plans aimed at contribution to the region using Hakodate's own resources which are actually the issues Hakodate is facing After that, they visited several enterprises based in Hakodate in a variety of fields for interview them about their motivations and goals for starting their businesses, as well as about their contribution to the region. The students practiced the "contextual inquiry" method in order to turn up any clues forgain hints about starting up businesses from the interviews.
Based on the findings the students obtained through their fieldwork, each team gave a presentation by using a diorama to show off their business plan.

Interview of the founder of a leather product design firm (left), Right: Brainstorming and building dioramas (right)

Comment from Kazuhide KON (UoA 1st year Master's student):
"This event taught me the difficulty in discovering issues and made me understand various social frameworks that need to be concerned upon starting up businesses. However, through this off-campus learning, I keenly realized that there are still unknown fields that I had not been aware through on-campus learning.

The last session was about facilitation skills . Smooth and active meeting proceeding skills were taught. Through facilitation exercise, students were required to unite the organization from the fair position as a leader.

Team presentation (left),Expressing business startup images by the miniature garden method (right)

Team DHA, led by Yuhei AKAMA, a UoA 2nd year Master's student developed computer application for preventing losing personal belongings such as keys and wallets by giving points upon dropping these items into the Wasuren Box. In corporation with members from Future University Hakodate and Doshisha University. It got the best votes in the online poll.

Wasuren Box got the best online votes

UoA is working on fostering human resources rich in creativity with discovering issues and solution skills in the team working environment for various practical software developments. This curricular is for graduate students and planned to be implemented next year, too.