"Israelis keep asking one question after another, and they always argue due to different opinions," said Shirly Cofiman, Consul of Economic and Trade Mission at Consulate General of Israel in Guangzhou. Her words made GTIIT faculty and students laugh out loud.

GTIIT is featured with innovation and entrepreneurship education. During their undergraduate studies, students can get involved in research projects and learn about innovation and entrepreneurship systematically through relevant courses. This wonderful sharing by Shirly Cofiman is part of the program.

"Our goal is to cultivate technologically innovative talents with an open and independent mindset, diversified insights and design capabilities, daring to try, to do and to be the first to others'.  The course will consolidate students' scientific knowledge and ability, and improve their recognition of entrepreneurship thus to increase the probability of success in self-employment," said Dr. Victor Huang, who is responsible for GTIIT entrepreneurship course. Focusing on cultivating students' international perspectives, this course provides students with theoretical knowledge and practical teaching activities such as the international learning project "X-Culture" and "Launch Start" in order to effectively help students improve their innovation and entrepreneurship capabilities.

As one of the largest international learning projects in the world, "X-Culture" involves more than 60,000 students from 652 universities in 102 countries on all 6 continents. Participants are divided into different groups randomly to complete consulting projects raised by 12 international companies. Chen Liu, a student from Chemical Engineering program, noted that she benefited a lot from this course. "The outbreak of Covid-19 has caused major changes in the international environment. International companies are facing problems of digital transformation, structural adjustments in supply chain, and changes in customer consumption habits. We need to understand the current international situation and think about how to transform and upgrade companies in the post-epidemic era as well as carry out innovative international collaboration in this project." Teaching Assistant Wang Kankan spoke highly of the students' performance. "Working with people from around the globe, our students overcome interdisciplinary difficulties, cultural differences, time-zone dispersion, and global communication challenges. They all did a really good job." Finally, 5 teams from GTIIT were selected from over 12,000 teams and won the "Best Team" of the "X-Culture" project this semester.

"I am glad that I chose this course, which provides me opportunities to meet geeks from different fields," said Year 1 student Chen Liu. She added that their sharing helps her to think outside the box, see the world from a diversified perspective and broaden her business ideas. Wang Ziming, a student from Materials Science and Engineering program said that Shirly's sharing was still fresh in his memory. "I have a better understanding of Israelis' mindset of 'stay curious and asking questions', which cultivate Israeli culture that appreciates failure, innovation and challenge."

GTIIT entrepreneurship course aims to cultivate students' creative and scientific mind through vertical and horizontal teaching mode since entrepreneurship is not something that can be achieved by merely using methodologies and theoretical tools.  In the next episode, we will share how students participate in Launch Start project to turn their professional knowledge into practice.

Text: GTIIT Research, Innovation & Graduate Studies

Photos: GTIIT Research, Innovation & Graduate Studies, News & Public Affairs