The SMART Project is a business engagement project for universities in Indonesia to support employability and transition into the graduate labor market. The project, which started with the SMART Kick Off Project event, was inaugurated on June 24, 2020 by ITS Vice Chancellor IV Bambang Pramujati MSc Eng PhD.

The project initiated by Prof. Dr. rer nat Irmina Kris Murwani MSi, one of the ITS lecturers, is a project funded by Erasmus+ in strengthening Capacity Building at the High Education Institution (HEI). In this project, the program being implemented is Entrepreneurship. “This program is the most suitable if done in Indonesia from the choice of programs offered by Erasmus+,” he explained.

According to Irmina, the SMART Project was motivated by the impact of the solid university-business relationship on broad socio-economic growth in the current “European Strategy 2020”. While in European countries, business-university cooperation has increased in recent decades. So this shows evidence that there is a critical need for good models and practices for the creation of strategies and instruments in this domain, because there is very little interaction between universities regarding entrepreneurship.

According to the Professor of the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Data Analytics, ITS as the maker of the SMART Project proposal, he said that this collaboration could integrate lessons learned in Europe into the context of the Partner Country (PC) which was the target of the SMART Project’s initial action. This project was carried out with the aim of increasing the capacity and skills of Indonesian HEI personnel for the implementation of productive university-business cooperation.

In addition, he continued, the project also aims to build and operate a sustainable structure of Business Engagement Centers (BECs) with a ‘one-stop’ approach to support students, researchers and companies. “So there is a national network in the form of a dialogue platform to share experiences and good practices in business-university cooperation,” he said.

The project team consists of 10 universities from Indonesia and Europe. In more detail, seven local universities consisting of ITS, Diponegoro University (Undip), Udayana University (Unud), Mataram University (Unram), Sam Ratulangi University (Unsrat), Kalimantan Institute of Technology (ITK), and Raja Ali Haji Maritime University ( UMRAH) and there are three European universities consisting of Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna (UNIBO), Italy, Agora Institute for Knowledge Management (AGORA) in Alicante, Spain and the University of Turku (UTU) in Turku, Finland.

ITS itself in this project plays an active role as the project leader and the project coordinator is Prof. Dr. rer nat Irmina Kris Murwani MSi because he is the maker of the SMART project proposal. All forms of activity started from ITS with one of them making a proposal to be submitted to Erasmus+ which was done by Irmina. Meanwhile, three European universities are mandatory requirements to be funded by Erasmus+. Six Indonesian universities were selected based on the commitments given. “I contacted universities in Indonesia, but only six gave a positive response, so I chose it on the basis of that commitment,” explained the doctoral graduate in Germany.

Furthermore, Irmina explained that this project proposal was submitted for the first time to Erasmus+ in 2017. Until finally in August 2019 the proposal was accepted and could be funded by Erasmus+. Just to note, this proposal is the second proposal after the first proposal failed to pass funding, so it needs to be revised and submitted as a new proposal in 2018.