Within the frame of the programme for innovation Disonancias, Ideazoka is Market of Ideas produced by Platoniq and the Department for Innovation and Entrepreneurship of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Mondragon. Ideazoka wants to be a meeting point and a space for public participation where cooperatives and companies, students, researchers, workers, early retired people and citizens will contact echa other to create a map of opportunities and mutual collaborations.


Research commissioned

To design an "environment" where activities aimed at the developemt of creative, innovative and entrepreneurial abilities are encouraged in the short to medium term for engineering students, professors ans company professionals.


IDEIAZOKA. A MARKET OF REBOUNDING IDEAS

Promoting the enterprising capabilities of students, professors and professionals by designing a unique framework for this was the starting point for Mondragon Goi Eskola Politeknikoa and the Platoniq collective, whose proposals converged in Ideiazoka, a market of ideas that hopes to lead to the creation of a local distribution and management cooperative of business ideas.

Mondragon Goi Eskola Politeknikoa is a non-profit education cooperative and Platoniq is an international collective made up of cultural producers and software developers whose work generates innovative collective research tools and methodologies. The project developed by the two had to converge in the design of an environment that would favour the promotion of the innovative and enterprising capabilities of students, professors and professionals. The team formed within the Disonancias framework had to connect with and provide possible solutions to the needs of some 20 organisations in the community of Urola Medio, doing this by using the potential of students and researchers from Mondragon Unibertsitatea and professionals from the participating entities.

Platoniq wanted to work with the university by aiming to verify the possible potentialities of the cooperative model by taking into account the similarities this has with its own work methology, being as it is a pioneer in the production and distribution of copyleft culture. Consequently, this organisation -highlights of whose work includes the Bank of Common Knowledge- believes that in the genesis of the developed project beats an implicit desire: to reactivate the original mission of the cooperative model (to return to the source) and disseminate innovation in a step-by-step manner.

Once the foundations had been laid, Platoniq claims that "perhaps the most complex thing was finding a way of working with the school, because it was not so accustomed to using tools such as the Internet, which facilitates the sharing of information and collaborative work".

Part of the collective set up for a month and a half in Antzuola (Gipuzkoa), a town between Mondragón and Azkoitia, the nerve centres of the project. And there they developed an exhaustive field work, meeting with professors from the 18 lines of research in the school and then, in collaboration with Eskola's Innovation and Entrepreneurship team, choosing solutions from researchers, requests made by companies, ideas from students and challenges suggested by these pioneers for initiating this cooperative model. To do this, they visited faculties, cooperatives, companies, health clinics, elderly people's homes and farmers' unions: "We noticed that it was important to actually be there physically. Access to information in that work context flows through personal networks, by being there and the community".

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