Entrepreneurial ideas respond to real world problems
IE School of Architecture and Design launched an open international student contest for entrepreneurial ideas responding to real world problems. The contest invites young architects and designers to draw up enterprising responses to any real life issue from the five categories: design and management, sustainability, urban space, construction materials, and business development.
The MBArch Entrepreneurship Challenge, now in its second year, aims to attract top talent from around the world to participate in the university’s Master for Business in Architecture and Design. The overall winners will receive a €10,000 scholarship towards tuition on next year’s course.
Jerónimo van Schendel, the program director of the Master in Business for Architecture and Design shared his ambitions for the competition, discussing the role the competition plays in the development of new local, international and underrepresented architectural and design talents, how key areas of concern should be tackled and he highlighted the importance of encouraging architecture students to focus on issues facing society globally:
“Focusing on real-world problems is key for the progress of the built environment.”
“The construction industry produces nearly 35 per cent of the CO2 in the world, contributing drastically to the physical environment around us, and the way people live. Innovation is about putting invention at the service of society at large with solutions that blend economic viability, design-enabled desirability and technical feasibility while operating within humankind’s resources and knowledge.”
While also noting the importance of educational institutions such as IE University in encouraging transdisciplinary collaboration:
“IE School of Architecture and Design has a very open and forward-looking vision for the role of architects in the future: one in which the intersection of design, business acumen, social, sustainability and technology awareness is fundamental.”
“It is also a role that requires increasing levels of collaboration and co-creation when working in highly multidisciplinary groups – not just in external corporate relations but mostly inside company structures. In the short term, we would like to develop competitions in which participants come forward from different professions – creating teams featuring architects, tech and economics experts, anthropologists, artists, and scientists all working together on a single problem.”
Read the full interview here.
Author: Merlin Fulcher / Publication: The Architectural Review