Incubator Platform for Multidisciplinary Innovation in Research and Education

In this article, an incubator platform concept is presented to demonstrate the authors’ approach in meeting the enormous challenges faced by future multidisciplinary research and education. The abstraction level of laboratory projects needs to be raised to a level where the researchers and students have the opportunity to deal with hands-on real-life system-level problems and decisions, while simultaneously various fundamental key technologies of the information society are integrated into the systems. Their approach is concretized by an Incubator experimental platform. Facilitated by this environment, researchers, engineers and students can join their efforts in developing next-generation products in a well-organized manner. The targeted products must meet the increasingly important special characteristics required for the digital era – self- and context-awareness, built-in information security, distributed networking, enormous scalability and device interoperability. Many projects are today developed by distributed multicultural teams, so it is a necessity that the development can also be implemented in co-operation of several universities in different countries, in order to promote the career skills of the students. The incubator platform proposed in this article is able to provide viable answers and solutions to all the mentioned challenges in engineering research and education, coupling the curriculum tightly to top-class academic research.