In the project seminar called EDUCASS (EDUcation Consortium for Academic Services and Solutions), two students from the University of Muenster’s Department of Information Systems are part of an international team involving 13 students from four different universities around the globe, participating in the global Future Talents project. Together with students from Stanford University (USA), the Technical University of Vienna (Austria), and the Higher School of Economics (Russia), they are tackling the problem of the increasing global shortage of professionals with skills in the field of information technology.

There is a tremendous lack of IT talent in the world. To solve this problem, the student team is sponsored by NapoleonIT  and SAP, which initiated the international Future Talents project. For nine months, the students research the market and develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to address the problem.

Muenster’s team members are students from both the bachelor and master program in Information Systems (Wirtschaftsinformatik). Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Joerg Becker, Dr. Michael Raeckers, Dr. Dr. Victor Taratukhin, and Holger Koelmann from the Department of Information Systems are managing the project from the academic side. On the sponsor’s site, SAP is also represented by Dr. Dr. Victor Taratukhin and Napoleon IT is represented by its CEO Pavel Podkorytov. They are joined by professors and experts from the other involved institutions as well.

Kristina and Niklas, the WWU’s students participating in the project: “As students, we are excited to participate in a project that fosters cooperation between academia and practice. International collaboration is the best opportunity to confront global problems like the IT talent shortage and find innovative solutions.”

The ME310-methodology from Stanford, which is based on Design Thinking, was taken as the organization and execution approach for the project. According to it, the best solutions to business problems can be found when the creative analysis is performed by professionals of different backgrounds in collaboration. Therefore, each participant contributes to the project’s success according to the students’ specialization to find solutions to the problem under the supervision of the professors and sponsors.

Discover more about Future Talents on the project’s website  or reach out to the chair of Information Systems and Information Management held by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Jörg Becker.