FOR ACADEMICS > INDUSTRY CHALLENGES
Include Industry Challenges
into your Course
AT A GLANCE
OUR MARKETPLACE
Incorporate challenges that fit your course's learning objectives from the TELANTO marketplace
OUR COACHES
Collaborate with industry partners, receiving support from TELANTO PhDs
OUR PLAYBOOK
Take advantage of a proven collaboration methodology, validated by fellow professors
OUR TECHNOLOGY
Use our platform to manage the entire interaction and student collaboration process
Why work with industry partners?
Experiential aka Action Learning is a proven and established methodology (by Reg Revans, University of Manchester) educating students across a broad variety of faculties to put knowledge and skills into practice by solving real industry challenges as part of their course syllabus by responding to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge.
During these experiential learning sessions, students solve real problems and acquire transversal skills such as: critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, teamwork, and communication skills. It creates a dynamic, creative collaboration between students, scientists and company representatives.
How do I include TELANTO challenges into my course?
You as the professor are the cornerstone of designing the inclusion of industry challenges in your project-oriented course. In your Call for Challenges you define a number of relevant aspects, such as:
- Learning objectives for the students and potential outcomes at the end of the collaboration period
- Methodologies introduced into the course to help students cope with the resolution of the challenge
- How long you want the teams of students to work on the collaboration with the industry partner
- How large the teams are and how many industry partners and respective challenges you invite into the course
Selected challenges from the TELANTO marketplace
Finance
Help us expand our understanding and our vision for this technology identifying some concrete use cases (e.g. fraud management, auditing, smart contracts, support for new business models)
This challenge is about finding methods to measure effectiveness and efficiency of the different Anti-money laundering (AML) systems implemented within our company group. Typically, Anti-money laundering (AML) systems are analyzing financial transactions to detect suspicious cases, when the purpose is not a licit business, but rather fictional operations, aiming to legitimize funds as the result of those transactions.
Within the financial industry a lot of change is driven by new innovative players who are challenging existing business models of established financial services providers. In order to participate successfully in this change, the challenge is to screen the FinTech-market in the areas of the Corporate Lending Business and to identify potential collaboration partners and models
Sustainability
Develop an environment-friendly mattress which is easily recyclable, e.g. by considering different materials as well as their combination, their longevity and the possibility to re-use them
Electric vehicles (EVs) in their engineering simplicity allow us to embrace more innovative designs. Importantly they create a world of opportunities in new and sustainable approaches to sales. Most manufacturers are focusing EV product development opportunity on futuristic concepts of Homes on Wheels while not embracing other design possibilities that only EVs offer. These include modular design, re-electrifying classic vehicles or innovative approaches to purchase.
Pipette tips are cone shaped life science research consumables that are currently packaged in a grid pattern inside plastic boxes (racks). These racks are then boxed and shipped to laboratories around the world. The packaging of pipette tips is not environmentally friendly due to its high reliance on non-sustainable plastics and low packaging density. Although pipette tips do an immense amount of good in supporting life science research, these two issues cause the production of pipette tips to have a negative environmental impact. This challenge is to re-imagine pipette tip packaging and determine a more sustainable solution that meets customer requirements.
Engineering
A SMART motor is a motor able to adapt automatically the working conditions of the windshield wiper depending on external factors.
A hospital is a place that we go to in order to heal, but what happens when you catch a hospital acquired infection? Infection Control is becoming more and more important for healthcare facilities – to protect their patients, employees, and their bottom line!
Today plasma fractionation is still growing mostly driven by the production of immunoglobulins which are used in a growing number of indications. Due to the high demand fractionation companies are looking for more efficient fractionation methods. To consistently adjust alcohol concentration, an on-line measurement to determine alcohol concentration in the protein suspension would be highly beneficial.
Business
We are a year-round integrated service provider in the tourism and leisure industry in a destination of the Swiss Alps. This year a new subsidiary was founded, which facilitates the rental of holiday apartments. Due to its great success, we believe this business model has a high scaling potential and thus would like to collaborate with a group of motivated students who can help us create and implement a multiplication strategy.
We are looking into mid-term European expansion opportunities and are considering Sweden, Denmark, Italy, France, UK and Ireland as possible countries where we could expand in the next years. In addition we would like to validate if the current business model, is still the correct one to enter into these new markets, or whether B2C could be a better approach.
We created a solid modular powertrain, which would change the way people move in today’s urban landscape. Their modular Kits convert ANY skate or long board to electric while adapting to your needs, not the other way around. Designed in Barcelona, one of the top 10 smart cities in the world, the incredible lifestyle and community energy has given them the platform to make their vision a reality. The challenge for the student teams consists of a market research and launch strategy for the German-speaking markets
Innovation
The challenge is to design an innovation process for our group's (HR-)IT that is easy to adopt for the organization and efficient as well as sustainable in its use.
We want to develop a Sustainability Strategy as part of our culture, integrating Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria in our business, processes and people. Our sustainability is designed to support our purpose of becoming the wellbeing partner of our customers through responsible and impactful actions with our customers and employees. Providing risk transfer solutions that encourage risk prevention & incentivize customers to adapt sustainable behaviors and leveraging our accumulation expertise, we accompain and protect our clients along its life. We want to drive our activity ensuring a positive impact in society so. We want to identify best opportunities to develop a social innovation project.
Committed to innovation, we provide added value products and services to meet the essential needs of current and future generations. There is a dedicated approach with regards to the innovation and new business development, considering internal assets, know-how, market access as well as global mega trends and industry specific needs such as regulatory challenges/changes. In this challenge we would like to get an assessment whether our innovation strategy meets market needs, whether we should re-adjust. Also, the applied tools can be implemented as a toolbox in future innovation strategy assessments.
Supply Chain Management
Predicting logistics and supply chain trends will make a difference to our businesses but has become notoriously difficult, given the speed at which technology in particular can suddenly disrupt the way things are done. With an empowered consumer base now dictating supply and demand, accelerated time to market pressures, intense global competition and the continual rise of the Internet and mobile economies, we and our peers need to be able to make production decisions on the spot by leveraging the latest supply chain information at their fingertips. At the same time, technological advances such as the Internet of Things, automated transportation and similar futuristic innovations are offering tremendous opportunities to drive efficiencies and operational excellence.
Help us manage better warehouse occupancy levels! How? Create a simple tool to simulate the warehouse occupancy for the next 18 months according to the OPLAN and all ongoing projects related to pull in or out inventory.
With a specific need to optimise the transportation network to increase speedand reduce cost, Duvenbeck was looking to identify new approaches to an recurringly arising challenge with a clear impact on bottom line results and customer satisfaction. Additional considerations to lower carbon impact through better utilisation of available freight spaceas well as the optimisation of an integrated data flow between enterprise resource planning systems, went into the overall challenge description.
Computer Science
We are a global financial services provider of a major car manufacturer. When most people see shiny new cars on a garage forecourt they don’t know that the dealer doesn’t own the cars. financial services provider does. We would like to challenge you to conceptualize a prototype, which helps us to develop a stock checking system designed to replace manual inventory control.
We want to incorporate augmented reality masks for soccer into our platform. Masks will be both to support your team, as well to express emotions (after a goal, won game, won trophy, anger with the ref...)
Virtual and augmented reality technologies are promising to revolutionise the way we present and experience information, which will have profound implications for educational institutions. This challenge looks for the current state of these technologies and their educational applications today, as well as exploring the exciting future possibilities they will enable.
Human Resources
Workplaces are slowly changing. Due to digitization and other workplace trends, an increasing number of open space offices and clean desk policies are introduced. However, initial research shows that open office spaces have a negative impact on labor productivity and direct communication. Modern workplaces with open office spaces and clean-desk policies often deprive their workers of the possibility to engage emotionally with the work space and their colleagues. In addition, they fail to create the right conditions for workers to be productive: too noisy, not the right light and temperature, disturbances by co-workers, inappropriate devices, paperless desks - the conditions are often far from ideal to concentrate, but also for collaborative and creative work. We need to revamp existing concepts based on our own ideas, experiences as well as the research results provided.
Growing revenues and a positive business outlook drives the need and hiring for additional employees. In sight of changing work-models, a smart approach to offer employees office space and possibilities to flexibly use facilities or their home office was required. Somfy needed to build visibility on board level for the “Arbeitswelt 2025” (Future of work 2025) project and required analytical insights particularly regarding the social implications, technical feasibility and others, for employees working from home.
The challenge is to provide a solution for a conflict management for intercompany resolution and reconciliation. Approaches that have been looked at include generating automatic reminder for not reconciable intercompany conflicts and documentation of conflict management. In addition in the case of not clarified conflicts an escalation process should be automatically started. We are looking for a complete concept and viable approach to the topic and look to eager students to take on this highly sensible topic.
Data Science
Analysis of the data and definition of a prototype model that predicts with enough confidence the likelihood of a customer to accept our quote for a given price. In our sector both we and our competitors are defining the prices based on negotiation with our customers. We believe that the digitalization is a must and will also come to our sector. Therefore we would like to be prepared or even to be the initiators of the on-line selling. For that reason we need to be able to define the best adjusted price for our customers (based on any BI algorithm) to increase the margins for the company, but also maintain our sales.
During the year, the number of users in our facilities can vary greatly from one day to the other. Since we need to be prepared for high demand, this results in high staffing levels. The current staffing model only allows limited flexibility and leads to high personnel costs and lower profit. We would like to collaborate with a group of highly motivated students, to develop a demand-driven staffing model.
We would like to take advantage of establishing a technical system solution to analyze big data, reduce manual workload and gain important new insights in steering related topics in our financial streams. A high degree of automatization and new machine learning technologies will be necessary. We made our first experiences with predictive analytics (payment prediction) and right now we are searching new use cases within finance end-to-end processes for predictive analytics to optimize our business information management.
Our Academic Support
Whether you are new to Experiential Learning or doing it for a while, you will appreciate the support from our team providing valuable insights and interaction in light of your students' experience and adopted collaboration methodology. We specifically facilitate:
Definition of an attractive, industry-relevant Call for Challenges
Proposition of challenges (from TELANTO marketplace) with high propensity to match and moderation of the challenge finetuning
Introduction of a proven and validated collaboration playbook
Preparation of the industry representative to be/come a reliable engagement partner for you as well as for the students

CHRISTIAN ACOSTA-FLAMMA, PhD
Head of Challenge Coaching & CEO
Christian is the visionary and innovation leader behind TELANTO spearheading the design of TELANTO’s market leading Academic Business Cloud solutions and is overseeing the strategic direction of TELANTO and playing a hands-on role in bringing innovative products to market. He is instrumental in ensuring that TELANTO’s solution and service portfolio maintains its cutting-edge status in the fast-growing EdTech and HCM industry.
A simple process for experiential learning engagements
What Professors Have to Say
We have a vast network of university and professor partners taking advantage of TELANTOs Academic Business Network and its industry challenge sponsors

Paul Tagliamonte, PhD
Executive Professor
at Northeastern University
This semester is going very well - two teams, two fine companies to support, and two fine sponsors. I am thrilled. Students continue to APPRECIATE this very real experience too. Honestly, zero issues or concerns.

Julia Backmann, PhD
Assistant Professor
at University College Dublin
After publishing my first Call for Challenge with TELANTO, I was pleasantly surprised by the quick response to pair my course with high-quality industry challenges from reputable companies based in different European countries.

Antero Kutvonen, PhD
Post-Doctoral Researcher
at LUT University
I have already collaborated with TELANTO in more than 4 courses and I am extremely satisfied with the quality of the challenges and respective challenge sponosors.
Experiential Learning Course Examples
Provide you with insights into specific problems managers in supply chain management face, and to explore their approaches to problem solving
How to lead and collaborate with people and how to manage people related issues in an international context. The successes and limitations of different leadership concepts and tasks and their applicability to multinational contexts.
Students of a diverse and highly international background bring their knowledge and skills in analyzing and implementing open innovation (OI) in its various forms to tackle the challenges that companies face in opening their innovation processes
The Academic Business Network platform
Select
Browse the TELANTO marketplace to pick and choose the challenges of your liking

Supervise
Compose the student teams (e.g. based on their preferences) and supervise the collaboration to a fruitful learning experience

Evaluate
Evaluate learning objectives as well as transversal competencies demonstrated while collaborating as a team with an industry representative

Have your students earn a university-industry collaboration certificate
Experiential learning is a great way to develop transversal competencies and also to demonstrate skills and capabilities in collaboration with an industry representative.
That is why at the end of every collaboration the professor and the industry representative evaluate the outcome and the shown competencies, resulting in a joint certificate for every individual student.
Students are continuously looking to differentiate from the crowd of fellow learners and to add credibility to a typically short CV.
With the certificate showing competencies and endorsements students are now equipped with a real asset next to their degree to land their dream job.
How do I start?
Download the brochure and get in contact with us to discuss your options to start your experiential learning engagement with us in the question of days (we are ready if you are)
Get More Information
Enter your information below to view the experiential learning prospectus from TELANTO