Fast-tracking technology innovators
The Innovation Hub's CoachLab™ Leadership Programme has been conceptualised to develop world-class human capital for the high-tech industry. The programme will focus on technology areas where a need exists to fast track the deployment of relevant South African skills.
A CoachLab™ will be run as a partnership between industry, tertiary education and The Innovation Hub. The partners respectively provide project work and supervision, students and infrastructure. Each CoachLab™ will bring its own style and character to a physical, hands-on entrepreneurial learning environment with integrated core competencies, leadership and practical skills. Within a year students can mature into new economy innovators - able to take initiative, work in a team, apply knowledge and solve problems.
Students benefit from being exposed to real-life, mission-critical project work where they gain valuable practical experience whilst earning money and continuing their postgraduate programmes.
Companies gain access to affordable, highly skilled human resources to execute a specific task. Tertiary education institutions benefit through feedback from students about the realities in the working environment that can be used to inform curriculum development.
Smart People for a Smart Province
The dynamic pace of growth in the Information and Communications Technology industry has highlighted the need for increased numbers of ICT postgraduate students in Gauteng. In response, The Innovation Hub launched the first pilot CoachLab™ - the ITCoachLab - in partnership with EPI·USE (Pty) Ltd and the University of Pretoria (UP).
Postgraduate students from UP are being mentored by IT experts from EPI·USE (Pty) Ltd to work on 'real-time' projects at The Innovation Hub's pilot facilities in Pretoria.
The ITCoachLab's proximity to the pilot business incubator at The Innovation Hub, allows students to interact with entrepreneurs who are establishing new knowledge-driven enterprises in the Incubator. In this way the students are exposed to the realities of start-ups and can experience, first-hand, the entrepreneurial spirit required for putting Gauteng on the road to robust economic growth.
Read more about the people and the projects at the ITCoachLab in our next newsletter.
Students currently participating in the ITCoachLab are:
(front from right) Pam Hill, Emil Saayman, Ntosh Wayi, (middle from right) Christian Mouton, Jacques Buitendag, Richard van der Wath, David Naylor, and (top) Ulrich Paquet.
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