An open coworking space to allow engineering students to develop innovative competences: UTEC GARAGE

Interactions between industry and academia are seen as one of the key elements of the quality of higher education and a key element of the system of innovation of the nations. However, there is a widely noted gap between industry needs and the education that new engineers receive. This manuscript presents an open co-working space implemented by the Universidad de Ingenieria y Tecnologia equipped with electrical, mechanical and industrial tools, to allow students, faculty and industry's engineers not only to build engineering projects or products that solve real problems, but also to fix and adapt personal technical products by applying and developing theirs innovative skills. We have called it the ‘UTEC GARAGE’ and this space is transforming every time according with the different projects developed to assure the learning and collaboration between industry — academia — society. We are in the second version of the implementation. Started in 2014, the UTEC GARAGE is always open to the university community with a total of more than 250 projects developed in only 4 semesters, including 1 patent and 4 patent applications. We expect to have a full use of the UTEC GARAGE in the next semester to get up to 500 students, 170 engineering projects, per semester. We have started talking to close universities to replicate this model in their campuses to create a GARAGE network to provide more collaboration in engineering education and projects.