Massage on Entrepreneurship Educational Initiatives

In 2017, our proposal for “Program for Next Generation Entrepreneur Development Project” called EDGE-NEXT was adopted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.  This is a consortium with Nagoya University as the main institution,Toyohashi University of Technology,  Nagoya Institute of Technology, Gifu University, and Mie University as collaborative institutions, and Osaka University as a cooperationg institution. The purpose of this program is to deverop human resources who will take on the challenge of startiong a business or creating a new business based on the results of university research and development, and to build a local start-up ecosystem.

Our university has also utilized this program to carry out various activities, including the busines school that started in 2018. Also, the “Entrepreneurship Eduaction Promotion Office” will be established in 2020, and we are planning to further work on entrepreurship education and human  resource development.

 About 80% of the students are from technical colleges at our university. We also accept diverse students such as ordinary high schools, technical high shools , and international students, and aim to become a global university that coexists with multiple cultures. We carry out “spiral education” that repeats education from admission to basics and applications so that students can achieve the goal of  “cultivationg creative and practical engineers” by the time they graduate. There are many students who are extremely  strong in engineering and technology.

 On the other hand, due to the covit19 pandemic in 2020, the traditional industrial structure and Japanese style management had to change signficantly. Until now, it has been thought that the ability to accurately do what was instructed by creativity was required in the workplace, but in the future, we will need human resources who have flexibility, creativity, and entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship education at our university not only provides entrepreneurship  education to a few percent of students who want to start a business, but also conveys the need to students who do not want to start business now. We aim to show the direction to the members of the organization and to develop the human resources that are truly necessary for society to innovate and grow the organization. Our university is characterized by industry-academia collaboration , and  we believe that unique entrepreneurship education is possible through strong ties with local companies. Through joint research and internships with local companies, we would like to put into practice the ideas of students who are strong in engineering technology while learning about the understanding of local communities, local economies and the issues of local companies.

We aim to develop students who can build their own careers in collaboration with local campanies and governments. We believe that this will lead to the fostering of a regional innovation ecosystem and the revitalization of regional industries.

Vice President ( in charge of strengthening research capabilities) /  Director of Research Administration Center                                                                                                              Dr. Saburo Tanaka