**Our Challenge**  
Develop a startup concept that addresses a specific societal problem, such as waste management, affordable housing or renewable energy. The startup should focus on innovative solutions while integrating key considerations such as technology, business models, and stakeholder engagement.

**Expected Impact**  
The solutions proposed by students can serve as actionable ideas for future startups. Additionally, the knowledge imparted in this module equips participants with concrete skills and insights essential for building a startup. This initiative fosters entrepreneurial thinking and problem-solving capabilities, enabling participants to contribute to solving global challenges through innovation.

CV (Curriculum Vitae) is a document that summarizes your educational and professional history. It must provide a detailed overview of your academic and work experience, skills, achievements, and qualifications.

Motivation letter is a personal statement and it might include a brief introduction of yourself, explanation why are you interested in the learning opportunity you are applying to, any relevant experience or skills that you have, your goals and how this opportunity will help you achieve them, This document should not be more than 400 words.

Motivation Letter

Hamburg University of Technology

Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship with a Focus on Technological Innovation

Empowering Startups to Solve Real-World Problems

Entrepreneurship, technology and innovation

Hydrogen is considered a great hope for the successful implementation of the energy transition and the complete shift away from fossil fuels. Politicians, scientists and industry players generally agree that hydrogen can be used in a wide range of applications - and in some cases must be used to achieve ambitious climate protection goals. These considerations focus in particular on green hydrogen, which is produced in a climate-neutral way.

In this fully self-paced online course you will get a comprehensive overview of the background of the discussion about the use of green hydrogen as an energy carrier. You can build up knowledge regarding the technological basics and understand the connections between hydrogen and renewable energies in future, sustainable energy systems.

You can go through the single chapters according to your own demands and at your own pace. We recommend reading the module texts first and then watching the topic-specific expert lectures, as their content goes into a little more detail.

The course is recommendet for all learners participating in th Challenge "Hydrogen and Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) – Key Factors for Carbon-Free Aviation?"

This course were created in Aug 2021 by Fabian Carels and Lisa Karies, two scientist of Technische Universität Hamburg.

Green Hydrogen

Learn about the production, transportation, storage and use of green hydrogen

Energy and sustainability

This course combines the technical development of a mechanical system, such as a billiard-playing robot, with agile leadership principles and aims to have a strong collaboration between students from TU and ECIU institutions collaborating in complementary roles. TU students, primarily from mechanical engineering, focus on technical aspects such as designing, prototyping and testing the striking unit. They apply their expertise in CAD, 3D printing and mechanical systems to address technical challenges. ECIU students, from disciplines like sustainability, business strategies, and user-centered design, broaden the project’s scope by ensuring solutions are technically sound, economically viable and environmentally sustainable. This collaboration reflects real-world engineering projects, where interdisciplinary and international teams solve complex challenges. 

Together as a team and through structured milestones, they develop engineering skills, such as creating precise locking mechanisms and integrating coupling systems, while applying agile methodologies to foster continuous improvement. Simultaneously, the course emphasizes leadership development by challenging students to work in interdisciplinary and international teams, reflecting the global nature of modern professional environments. By applying agile principles to real-world challenges, students enhance adaptability, collaboration and problem-solving skills. The course also aligns with New Work principles, promoting productivity, sustainability and work-life balance. As an ECIU Micro Module, this course leverages CBL to create an active, impactful learning experience.

Transcript of Records is an official document issued by your home university. It specifies the name of the institution, the academic programme you are enrolled in, the list of courses taken up until the current period, the exams or tests you passed, the grades and the credits you earned. 

Transcript of Records

Agile Methodologies to Engineering Design

What happens when leadership skills and the task of pushing a billiard ball a long way come together? Let's find out!

Critical and innovative thinking

Inter-personal skills

**Our challenge**  

This course invites participants to design and fabricate 3D-printed structures that achieve maximum material efficiency while maintaining structural integrity. Central to this challenge is 3D printing technology, which embodies the democratization of production and a sustainable manufacturing strategy. Moreover, it allows individuals to design, prototype, and manufacture solutions autonomously.  

Through hands-on experience, students will develop technical skills and a mindset focused on innovation and resourcefulness. The course encourages critical thinking about how to optimize designs for minimal material use, exploring how 3D printing can revolutionize manufacturing by making it more accessible, customizable, and sustainable.  

**Expected impact**  

The course’s impact ranges from environmental sustainability to enabling independent design and production, with focus on material minimization and thus, resource efficiency. In a broader sense, by mastering 3D printing technology, participants will be prepared to contribute to a world where innovation is driven by people’s and societal needs, where the tools of creation are accessible to all.

Load-Bearing Efficiency: A 3D Printing Challenge

Circular economy

This Micro-Module is structured into introduction, self-learning, and implementation phases. First, you will get input on recent feature extraction and data analysis methods. You will work in a small team of three to four students solving detection and classification tasks on medical image data. In particular, your task is to automatically detect surgical tools and their motion in endoscopic images. To tune and test your algorithms we will provide image data from a surgical daVinci imaging system acquired in our laboratory. Participating in image annotation also allows you to better understand AI models and their limitations. Finally, we will test your algorithms on real medical image data. You can compare your results directly with other groups through our online leaderboard.

Image Analysis for Intelligent Systems in Medicine

Gain hands-on experience in developing AI for medical image analysis

Media and information literacy

The module is divided into three parts:

- background knowledge,

- simulation and experiments, and

- theoretical analysis.

The goal is to provide a holistic understanding of the manifold challenges associated with communication in Industry 4.0 and how IEEE 802.15.4 standard addresses these.  
  
The concepts learned in the introductory lectures will be directly applied in simulations using open-source software, as well as experiments with a real hardware.

Team-based assignments help you both deepen your understanding of the modern communication technology and improve collaboration skills. Finally, analytical evaluation explains how to compute fundamental performance bounds and validate Quality-of-Service for existing and upcoming applications, turning you into a fully-equipped network specialist.

Enabling Industry 4.0

Get in touch with Industry 4.0 challenges

How we make and use products generates half of the emissions in our current economic system, as the production of goods and infrastructure generates emissions all along the value chain. Therefore, the circular economy is inherently cross-sectoral and requires engagement with stakeholders across value chains in pursuit of innovations that contribute to resilient and low-carbon local economies.  

This societal challenge requires a broad set of skills that is currently lacking in our increasingly specialized society and education. It is therefore crucial that learners at all levels learn to collaborate, to solve ill-structured, complex problems that they get confronted with, by dividing them into smaller, doable tasks. Being able to create criteria and come to fact based decisions is one of the most valuable future skills.  

In this particular challenge, TUHH together with HiiCCE Hamburg Institute of Innovations in Climate protection and Circular Economy GmbH and the interreg project https://www.interregnorthsea.eu/ceo are taking a closer look on the transition of the office furniture sector towards a circular economy, integrating financial aspects and business cases. As in the office furniture sector many resources are still being wasted and new office furniture is usually not designed for reuse, repair, refurbishment or recycling. At the same time, the way we work is changing rapidly and constantly and requires office furniture that is modular, adaptable and recyclable. Considering financial aspects and business cases in the context of this challenge is essential for creating sustainable solutions that are economically viable. Learners will explore how sustainable practices can reduce costs. They will investigate how modular and adaptable furniture can extend product lifecycles, reducing the need for frequent replacements and lowering overall expenditures.  

We are inviting learners to engage on particular, self-chosen aspects to approach the economic aspects of this challenge, always taking into account their individual interests and ideas.

Circular economy for office furniture

Help to speed up the office furniture sector’s transition towards a circular and innovative economy with a focus on economic feasibility

In the face of the current AI revolution, Nobel laureate Christopher Pissarides recently cautioned against blindly studying STEM subjects and emphasised the need to foster creativity skills which he considers increasingly valuable in the workplace of tomorrow. Pointing in a similar direction, the World Economic Forum identifies creative thinking and AI as two essential future skills. This ECIU Challenge creates a learning context in which students in STEM and other areas of study can train these two highly important skills. In order to develop a relevant and sustainable solution to a challenge revolving around creativity in the era of AI, it is necessary to combine insights from different domains and disciplines. The course provides an environment in which the students bring their different disciplinary backgrounds and skills to the table to collaboratively work on such a solution.

Creativity and Artificial Intelligence

Use your creativity to identify a challenge at the intersection of creativity and AI!

Observations from weather stations have been widely used to study climate change over a long period of time. However, due to the scarcity of point-based weather observations, our understanding of the Earth’s changing climate is very limited. This impedes the advancement in our knowledge of the Earth’s climate system and our capability to develop well-suited climate models to simulate future climate change, which further results in considerable uncertainties associated with future climate projections. How to quantify and minimize these uncertainties is thus becoming one of the most challenging issues to be addressed for climate change impact assessment and adaptation studies. Remote sensing offers a new way of observing the Earth’s climate system with continuous and high-resolution spatial coverage through satellite-based, aircraft-based, or drone-based sensor technologies. This can significantly improve our understanding of climate change and its potential impacts at global, regional, and local scales. The data collected with remote sensing technologies can also be used to validate our climate models, improve our knowledge of the physical and dynamical processes of the climate system, and help us to project future climate change and its impacts with minimized uncertainties.

When it comes to the term’s sensors and research, you have to look very closely at what it is all about in the end. From the Smart Sensors department, research focuses on the sensor systems themselves, while at the same time sensors are an important component in various multidisciplinary research activities. In this Challenge, that is embedded in a course for Master students of Microelectronics and Microsystems the relevant aspects in interdisciplinary sensor research will be taught and explored together.

The Challenge aims to plan a mission for a small satellite that is actually capable of flight and that is built in one of the TUHH's Bachelor's programme. As a starting point we will explore the capabilities of fluorescence sensing. Vegetation fluorescence that can reflect photosynthetic activity and plant health and stress. In turn, this is not only important for a better understanding of the global carbon cycle, but also for agricultural management and food security.

Facing Climate Change with remote sensing

Plan a mission of Edusat

The course begins by providing a broad motivation for the design of multi- and many-core processors such as graphics processing units (GPUs). The first phase covers basic GPU concepts, including the evolution of GPU computing, a high-level overview of GPU architecture, and key differences from CPU architecture. Supplementary material is provided for students without a background in computer architecture fundamentals. Once a basic understanding is established, the module introduces the programming of GPUs using CUDA. The curriculum then delves into advanced concepts from both an architectural and programming perspective. To reinforce the theoretical knowledge gained in the lectures, students will engage in progressively more complex exercises throughout the module.

GPU Architectures and Programming

Providing you with hands-on experience in solving computationally intensive tasks faster and with lower energy consumption (SoSe25)

**Our Problem to be solved:**  

Develop a conceptual design for a flexible and stretchable electronic device or sensor tailored to a specific application, such as wearable healthcare monitoring or robotic touch sensors.  

For this, it is necessary to:

- understand the material properties required for the device (e.g., flexibility, conductivity);
- address challenges in device design, such as stability, scalability, and environmental impact; and
- demonstrate societal, industrial, or scientific relevance for the proposed device.

**Expected Impact**  

Participants will gain foundational knowledge of soft electronics and hands-on experience with theoretical device design. By focusing on practical applications, this module equips students with skills to address real-world technological challenges, fostering innovation in industries like healthcare and robotics.

Designing Flexible and Stretchable Electronics for Real-World Applications

Exploring the Fundamentals of Soft Polymer Electronics and Their Practical Impact

Resilient communities

Intra-personal skills

In the face of the current AI revolution, Nobel laureate Christopher Pissarides recently cautioned against blindly studying STEM subjects and emphasised the need to foster creativity skills which he considers increasingly valuable in the workplace of tomorrow. Pointing in a similar direction, the World Economic Forum identifies creative thinking and AI as two essential future skills. This ECIU Challenge creates a learning context in which students in STEM and other areas of study can train these two highly important skills. In order to develop a relevant and sustainable solution to a challenge revolving around creativity in the era of AI, it is necessary to combine insights from different domains and disciplines. The course provides an environment in which the students bring their different disciplinary backgrounds and skills to the table to collaboratively work on such a solution

Use your creativity to identify a challenge at the intersections of ethics, creativity and AI!

Global citizenship

Hydrogen and SAF have great potential to contribute to the decarbonization of industry and transport. One sector in which hydrogen and SAF are expected to play an important role is aviation. Aircraft manufacturers, airlines and airports are developing new technologies and utilization concepts. Hamburg Airport, for example, is preparing for the future use of hydrogen and SAF.  

But is it realistic to believe that we are moving towards a carbon-free aviation? What are the limiting factors? What ideas do you have for designing an efficient and reliable hydrogen and SAF supply system?  

Many factors need to be considered and can be analyzed in this challenge. Be part of this journey and get to know Airbus', HAM Airport’s and DLR’s current plans and visions, work on alternatives and scenarios that you consider important and bring in your own creativity.  

Experience working in an international group under the supervision of the teamchers and industry stakeholders. Present your results and ideas to the others.  

Whether you focus on one detail or think bigger – your ideas will make a difference.

Member university

Hamburg University of Technology

Member university

Hamburg University of Technology

Learning opportunities of Hamburg University of Technology