Lighthouse Project COIL HHN-UR-Rwanda 2024

As part of the COIL project (COIL stands for Collaborative International Learning) for international development cooperation in the Master's course Leadership (MU/HUGS), students in interdisciplinary German-Rwandan teams developed business concepts for a technologically innovative application for the Rwandan market. The students aligned their work with the seventeen global sustainability goals of the United Nations. In the COIL Project 2024, after a virtual COIL phase (April-May), the project presentations took place in a one-week in-person phase in Germany in June 2024. For this purpose, 17 Rwandan students, funded by EU funds (KA 171) and private sponsoring, came to Heilbronn.

The students worked in interdisciplinary teams with business administration and engineering students both in Germany and in the partner country Rwanda. Together, they developed product ideas and innovations that advanced to a defined level of maturity.

• The project content included:
• Development of a product idea with a feasibility analysis
• Submission of a technical concept
• Contribution to a market analysis
• Estimation of the product's manufacturability in the target country
• Contribution to the evaluation of the product's economic viability
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The project was closely supervised by lecturers from the partner universities (Hochschule Heilbronn and University of Rwanda). Reviews in the form of lectures and presentations served project management and provided early, close-knit feedback.