Challenges to leveraging innovation

ICFO creates challenges that give participants the chance to use their own creativity to design, build and test solutions that integrate photonics. These projects are conceived in different formats, either to be the base of research projects for secondary school and university students that require long periods of time (weeks) or to be solved within workshops in a shorter period of time.

In the framework of the European project, PHABLABS 4.0, in which ICFO collaborated with Fab Labs, secondary school and university students could participate in the challenge projects created by ICFO. These challenges required the participants to find solutions based on photonics and build a prototype using the tools and technologies that students would find at the Fab Labs that participated in the project.

Challenge projects could be developed around specific research areas, such as quantum, new materials (graphene) or biophotonics. You can have a look at the workshops created during the project to introduce photonics into makerspaces in the PHABLABS 4.0 website.