LET'S GET REAL! How to make student's development of products equally beneficial for all partners in university/Industry/Government partnership known as the BISI project

BISI is an acronym for Building Interfaces for Social Inclusion. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between two educations – an IT education and a social education from two different universities. Students from these two universities collaborate during a semester on developing; prototyping and testing welfare technology, which will help children with special needs, become included in society.
This paper presents findings in relation to a series of interviews with the partners in this interdisciplinary project, which took place for the fourth time in spring 2014. There will be particularly focus on answering the headline’s question – have all partners had equal value from the project? An indication that this has so far not been the case can be seen in the fact, that out of 23 potential products developed in the project’s four year history only 3 have been developed further after the project was finished.
The conclusions drawn from the findings in the interviews points to the fact that the prototype needs to be workable – and that this needs to be stipulated as a requirement of the prototype development for the students. Only a workable prototype gives industry a clear product idea, and only a working prototype can be tried out by the users.