At FASoS, creativity abounds. Hence, it is likely that students and staff members are full of ideas for improving life at FASoS. The Tiny Innovation Award rewards the best small idea for a big improvement. The reward consists of a VVV gift voucher of €100, as well as immediate implementation. Non-winning ideas will also be considered for implementation, so that no good ideas will be lost!
Submissions for the first round: 13 April 2018.
Since management agendas are usually dominated by big themes and hard choices, small ideas easily get lost. The Tiny Innovation Award rewards the best small idea for a big improvement. Submissions for the first round of the Tiny Innovation Award can be submitted until April 13, 2018. Another call for submissions will be opened in the academic year 2018/19.
Submission Procedure
Who can apply?
All staff members and students of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences can apply, with the exception of members of the Faculty Council and the Faculty Board.
How to apply
Please send your idea as a .doc or .pdf file to Sabine Kuipers (email: s.kuipers@maastrichtuniversity.nl) by Friday 13 April. You may hand in as many ideas as you have, creating a separate file for each idea. Please describe your small idea for a big improvement in max. 400 words, making sure to cover the following elements, and adding any pictures if needed:
- Problem: Which problem the idea is intended to solve
- Solution: How the idea solves the problem
- Implementation: where or by whom the idea should be implemented (e.g. the ICT department, facility management, teaching staff, etc.), and a rough estimate of the costs and efforts involved
Evaluation Procedure
All submissions will be assessed by an award committee, consisting of four members of the Faculty Council: two students, one member of academic staff and one of support staff.
All submitted ideas have to meet the following criteria to be considered for the award:
- The idea should make a self-evident improvement, which can be expected to be uncontroversial and does not just shift burdens and workloads from one group to another.
- The idea must be suitable to implement at little or no cost.
All ideas which fulfil these minimal requirements will be ranked by the award committee according to the criteria of feasibility, desirability and urgency of the problem being solved.
The award committee creates a ranked short-list of eligible ideas, which will be submitted to the Faculty Council and Faculty Board. Members of the Faculty Council and/or the Faculty Board can remove ideas from the shortlist if they anticipate that the idea in question will not lead to an undisputed improvement or that its implementation will be too costly; to do so, two or more members of the Faculty Council and/or Faculty Board have to agree that the idea is not eligible. Once ineligible ideas have been excluded through this procedure, the highest-ranking remaining idea on the shortlist will be awarded with the Tiny Innovation Award.
The winner of the Tiny Innovation Award will be announced in the FASoS Weekly and on the message screens at FASoS.
