Summary
A general description of the Innovation Community of practice (iCop) of Fontys ICT. It discusses the vision on innovation, the formulated goals and the working method of iCop.

Fontys ICT structurally invests more than 1 FTE in open innovation from the strategic budget. iCop is the innovation team of Fontys ICT for which employees have been able to apply. From the applicants, 7 candidates were selected to form the innovation team together with the project leader. This team is exempted one day a week for iCop work. The team is multidisciplinary in nature within the domain of ICT and can therefore tackle many issues within ICT and education. The group is led by a chairman/project leader. It is the intention that the actions of iCop lead to valuable and sustainable innovations within Fontys ICT. Experiments may also fail in order to learn from them.

iCop focuses on short term innovation projects to make education more effective under the motto of squicker smarter together. To prove the value of projects, iCop brings them to proof of concept.

In projects, iCop makes use of the thinking and doing power of students and staff for initiation, execution and usability. In case of proven value, iCop will provide an initial impulse for roll-out, embedding and dissemination in the organisation through “preparation for landing”. iCop's projects are innovation projects for education that will be implemented through crowdsourcing within Fontys ICT.

The team defines its own targets annually. The revenue of these targets will benefit education in general and Fontys ICT in particular. In addition, this team is at the disposal of the managing director to tackle “complex” or “explorative” problems.

The fixed scheduled iCop day is Monday.
Every iCop project looks for ways to turn it into a student project. Initially the Delta students will be involved, but projects in various study routes are also possible. Delta students from other institutes can also be involved. (Fontys Acedemy for Creative Industries (ACI), Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten also have Delta trajectories). The team's approach is similar to the grassroots innovation approach introduced at iFontys. In addition, SCRUM is used as a working method for the implementation of projects.
This approach is characterised by:

• Try Do Check Act;
• Good idea is at most a paragraph long;
• Rather 8 out of 10, than 3 out of 3 (take risk);
• Meetings are working meetings, only decisions are recorded;
• Project reporting is a maximum of 1 A4 in length.

For the products created in iCop, anchoring in the organisation will be sought by analogy with the iFontys “prepare for landing” trajectory. In addition, the products are made freely available to the world through the creative commons 3/4 principle. ¹⁾

More information about the (current) projects can be found on the employee section of the Fontys ICT Portal.