Start-ups, especially those with a focus on technical products or services, are known to be a key driver of innovation. Although engineering students are increasingly interested in founding and their start-ups are of considerable quality, Germany has a small number of new start-ups, as well as an equally low rate of innovation in the knowledge-based and high-technology sector compared to some other leading nations. Engineering students, which are most likely to found a tech related start-up seem to lack knowledge and incentives to start an autonomous venture. A survey of 109 engineering students, targeted this issue. It showed that only that 56,7% of the surveyed students could imagine establishing a start-up after completing their degree, but only 6% of the students actually plan to start a business, which was mostly due to the lack of preparation and the individual fear of failure. To face these challenges, the seminar “How to become an entrepreneur” is developed within the project ELLI 2. The extracurricular seminar provides students with skills they need to generate ideas, setting up a business plan and launch their business. Its program follows a two-pronged teaching approach. Theoretical frameworks as well as hands-on problem solving are integral parts of the learning experience to equip the students not only with knowledge, but with the ability of applying the acquired information. This paper outlines the approach of the developed seminar which is preparing students in an academic setting for applying their entrepreneurial knowledge.

Increasing complexity in production calls for a skilled workforce. With increasing demands on employee's qualification, also the pressure on companies to train their workforce is constantly rising. Technical knowledge in the context of managing, operating and interacting with new machines and media, so-called “digital literacy”, is thereby fundamentally desired within fast-paced changing environments. Here, the organizational learning infrastructure is next to personal variables a crucial factor, especially when it comes to knowledge generation. Due to digital transformation of work-places further development of employees receives evermore attention. In contrast to white-collar workers research on production workers is in this context widely underrepresented in current research and insights not often enough utilized. This study assesses current challenges production workers face and evaluates their work-related state of interaction with media. Furthermore, the study conveys insights into the factors which influence their learning motivations. The underlying data is generated through workshops, multi-perspective interviews and a subsequent questionnaire-based survey gathered within the German automotive industry. It is a first contribution by assessing and hence actively shaping a digital learning infrastructure to enable continuous knowledge management in production.

Guided Policy Search enables robots to learn control policies for complex manipulation tasks efficiently. Therein, the control policies are represented as high-dimensional neural networks which derive robot actions based on states. However, due to the small number of real-world trajectory samples in Guided Policy Search, the resulting neural networks are only robust in the neighbourhood of the trajectory distribution explored by real-world interactions. In this paper, we present a new policy representation called Generative Motor Reflexes, which is able to generate robust actions over a broader state space compared to previous methods. In contrast to prior state-action policies, Generative Motor Reflexes map states to parameters for a state-dependent motor reflex, which is then used to derive actions. Robustness is achieved by generating similar motor reflexes for many states. We evaluate the presented method in simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, including contact-rich peg-in-hole tasks. Using these evaluation tasks, we show that policies represented as Generative Motor Reflexes lead to robust manipulation skills also outside the explored trajectory distribution with less training needs compared to previous methods.

Managing project risks is challenging for many enterprises, especially smaller ones, because they generally only have very limited method or tool support, i.e. basic, qualitative and rather short term reaction to the occurrence of risks. This results in higher vulnerability and reduced competitiveness. This paper proposes a risk management framework fitting SMEs needs by providing a way to adequately quantify risks and address them at two levels. First, an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to perform cost-benefit analyses of the possible mitigation actions assessed through Monte-Carlo simulations. Second, an on-line optimisation tool is used to make sure the planning is following the minimal risk path and reschedule mitigation action as soon as a risk has materialised. To address the limited SMEs resources, the core components are provided as Open Source with a clean application programming interface for easing integration with existing tools. A reference integration with the Open Source Redmine project management tool is also provided.

Far reaching changes in university higher education have taken place in the last ten years. Different factors, e.g. necessity of on-professional competences in engineering education, rising or vast student numbers and new technical possibilities, have influenced the academic teaching and learning process. Therefore interdependence between requirements and didactical-educational possibilities is given. Because of changed circumstances an adaption of teaching methods and concepts is required. At the same time Bologna arrogates students to be placed in the centre of the teaching and learning process and claims on-professional competences for today's students. Especially for XL-Classes this is a specific challenge. One of the questions ensuing is how to increase learning success by the use of specific didactical methods? With a research approach connecting different proven didactical concepts and considering the previously shown conditions, the concept of the lecture “communication and organizational development” (KOE) at RWTH Aachen University has been redesigned. This lecture, organized by the Institute Cluster IMA/ZLW & IfU at RWTH Aachen University, is mainly frequented by up to nearly 1.300 students of the faculty of mechanical engineering and inherent part of the bachelor-curriculum. The following practical example prospects the multi-angulation of didactical concepts and shows up innovative educational teaching.