DII Collaborative Project

Aimed at enabling students to experience DII collaboration firsthand and to understand its importance, the DII Collaborative Project is the most ingenious initiative of the DII Collaborative Graduate Program for Accelerating Innovation in Future Electronics. In their fourth year, program students form teams based on the abilities, knowledge and experience they have gained through their long-term internships and research abroad; each team consists of students aiming to become a Deployer, an Innovator or an Investigator, and to cooperate with each other in addressing challenges associated with future electronics in the real world.

In this curriculum, challenges confronting the real world are presented by the Consortium for GaN Research and Applications or our partners of national and overseas institutions. To address such challenges, the Deployer draws up a business plan based on them; the Innovator presents solutions to technical issues in order to translate seeds into product development; and the Investigator proposes deep insight-based solutions resulting from ingenious research. Students of the three different types who have studied separately in their respective courses join forces with each other in this curriculum. While imagining a common product and deepening discussions from their respective viewpoints and based on their abilities, the students experience in advance the process they will go through in the future, thereby developing an attitude of creating a revolutionary product innovation. Any hard-to-solve problems that the students encounter during the course of this exercise will be addressed in the form of open innovation engaging researchers throughout Nagoya University and its overseas partner institutions, with everyone making a united effort.

Following the implementation of the DII Collaborative Project, the second qualifying examination (QE) is held. The program staff members including faculty members and those from the participating partner companies and research institutions meet at a retreat training camp to evaluate the achievements and provide feedback. Later, in the final year, the students aim to compile all their efforts made during the DII Collaborative Graduate Program into a single work—the Deployer to start up a business, the Innovator to develop a product, and the Investigator to publish an internationally co-authored paper.

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