FAQ

Business and education share a common challenge: How do we train professionals who can solve complex problems using constantly evolving technologies? In today's competitive environment, new technologies offer a crucial edge. But it's not just about technology; it's about how people leverage it to create value. bydo empowers students to learn through hands-on projects, aligning academic teachings with real-world needs. It's a standardized system with clear roles and rules: companies provide projects and infrastructure, students bring talent and creativity, and experts guide them through challenges. The academic partners integrate the work into their study programs as academic achievements.
The bydo framework is a standardized system with clear roles and rules: business partners provide the real-world challenge, the infrastructure and the project leadership. Student teams contribute their talent, creativity and work input. Learning coaches provide content and technical support to the student teams and develop team competencies. Educational partners embed the bydo framework in their study programs and regulate the recognition of the projects as study achievements.
Our business partners gain access to creative talent and expert knowledge from various educational institutions, within an easy to join, standardized and quality assured framework. They can implement interesting projects in an early stage, with little resources and reduced risks. They gain access to coaches’ expert knowledge and to a talent pool for future potential employees from within various institutions. Also, all property rights remain with the business partner.
What is crucially important in connection with enabling technologies such as data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence is that they all intrinsically have value, but this value becomes apparent only when these technologies are implemented. We lack the expertise for putting it all together. We can expect that the way we programme, apply new tools, work in low-code environments and use artificial intelligence will become relatively easy in future. But implementing these technologies to add value and become profitable for companies and organisations will always remain a creative act that requires context and cannot be taught in lectures and classrooms. Doing so needs a product and a process landscape. Technical learning calls for vast layers of context that universities are less and less able to provide. And, many of these technologies run on systems that universities are already struggling to afford and that may be out of reach in the medium term.
We believe that tackling the really big challenges calls for an approach that works independently of traditional teaching and the academic calendar. What’s crucial in our concept is that students are not left to fend for themselves but get the support they need from learning coaches who have a relationship with the educational institution and can guarantee the quality of the training being offered. We believe this to be the decisive factor.
The bydo services include:

Prepare project tenders 

Form student teams 

Appoint learning coaches 

Conduct preparatory studies (no costs if the project is canceled) 

Manage contracts, non-disclosure agreements, and property rights 

Handle controls and quality assurance 

Provide general support 

Provide access to the bydo talent finder for recruiting (wip) 
We aim to establish a learning universe where students, experts, institutions and businesses from all over Switzerland come together. bydo is interdisciplinary and inter-university, with the bydo platform as a neutral intermediary. Participation is possible with a project and/or as member of the bydo association.

In principle, all students can apply for bydo projects. Participation in bydo projects is possible regardless of the semester and can extend over several semesters. The only decisive factor is that applicants meet the requirements of the advertised position.
Yes. bydo has set itself the goal of putting together interdisciplinary and cross-university teams. 
Working on a bydo project offers many advantages for students:  

Students get to know the working environment in new fields of technology and thus acquire important future-oriented skills. 

Students gain practical experience, which is confirmed in a work certificate. 

Students gain access to first-class companies and potential employers. 

Students receive individual support and encouragement from their learning coaches (1-to-1 learning). 

Participation in bydo projects is recognized as academic credit.
Our learning coaches are experts suitable for the project. These can be (applied) university lecturers, guest lecturers or external experts from various domains. 
Guiding criteria for suitability as bydo projects are as follows:

Project design lets students experience the complexity of real data projects

Practical questions

Deliver immediate benefits for the company

Room for open outcome and creative problem solving

No pure processing of service or consulting projects based on existing templates

Duration of a learning box ranges from 3 month to open-end
No, because these are learning projects within the study program, which are remunerated with ECTS points. If desired by both parties, additional, individual agreements can be made between the project partner and the student. Our learning coaches are fully compensated.
Professor Dr Andreas Brandenberg, head of the master’s programme in Applied Information and Data Science at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, developed the bydo concept together with Peter Delfosse, CEO of the international digitalization company Axon. While Andreas is dreaming about extending Swiss university programmes beyond the traditional classroom and already pioneered project-based learning initiatives, connecting his Data Science students at the University of Applied Sciences in Lucerne with a diverse array of industry partners, Peter is looking for talents who can deliver the value derived from the new technologies. They both believe it’s time for educators and practitioners to start closing the emerging skills gap together and empower future talents to acquire the skills they need to prevail in their field.
bydo is an initiative between educational and business partners based on a public-private partnership and is co-financed to a substantial extent by private-sector partners. bydo was founded by Prof. Dr. Andreas Brandenberg, Head of the MSc Applied Information and Data Science program, and Peter Delfosse, CEO of Axon Management AG.
The association aims to promote collaborative forms of education that are developed in cooperation between educational institutions and partners from business and society. Members shape the strategy and embody the vision of bydo: to ensure the innovative and future viability of companies and organizations to create a university education that keeps pace with technological developments in practice.