CETRA Project Outline

Today some of the more needed capabilities in educational field consist on the ability to identify key competencies, to recognise them, to mobilise them quickly, to fight non-effective system of education and training, to be able to refer to the complex, at the context in a multileveled and global way. In fact the ability of organisations to identify key competencies, to recognise them, to encourage their development represents the basis for new competitive strategies, based on flexibility, rapidity in decision making and mastering wider competencies rather than chasing any new professional specialisation.

Therefore CETRA, as recommended by the European Green Book on Innovation, aims to provide tools to understand an “interconnected educational environment”. In the global society training processes assume a key role when they enhance “knowledge creation” which implies the construction of a “cognitive laboratory”  taking in consideration the virtue of “crossing” different fields. Our target will learn about “complexity” to acquire new skills about how to detect the real training needs while understanding the dynamics of the internal and external processes in which organisations engage.

CETRA aims at providing “vocational trainers” and potential users with theoretical and practical tools for planning strategies and new management style, in the perspective of promoting excellence, leadership and innovation. The approach of the project shall improve training process and be helpful for Vocational Trainers giving strategies and instruments for mastering complexity, developing scenarios and models of training actions and national schemes, training to logic and scientific thinking.

Main target groups are “Vocational Trainers”. Potential users of the project’s results are Human Resources Managers of SME and Large Companies, Consultants of Vocational Trainers, Directors of R&D. Main target group and potential users’s needs have been identified through a “preliminary survey” leaded by the co-ordinating organisation.

The CETRA main issue is to develop new methods, contents and concrete supports for people that have to create models, to understand change, to manage knowledge, by means of concepts mediated by the “Science of Complex Systems” While the “classical” scientific disciplines have developed theories to deal with sets of phenomena which are described at a particular level, complexity focuses on the relationships between different levels.

Several new concepts and tools have been recently developed, which cut across different disciplines (physics, biology, economics, sociology). In social and economic sciences “complexity” has allowed to study the behaviours emerging out of the interactions of different agents. By learning about complexity (generative relationships, complex networks, non linear dynamics, dynamical self organisation) our target will understand the dynamics of the internal and external processes in which organisations engage and in which knowledge, innovation and emerging technologies are created. CETRA will produce tools to recognise the process of creation of know-how, to understand innovation and the process of utilisation of research’s results.  Firm’s competitive advantage depends upon what it knows, how it uses what it knows and how fast it can create something new. Given the pervasiveness of change, managing that change becomes a strategic key.

CETRA provides tools to encourage an “approach” which refer to the complex and to the context in a multileveled and global way. To help “vocational trainers” to recognise “critical knowledge”, CETRA case studies will be identified among  innovative organisations which by nature construct products, processes, related knowledge that did not exist before, thus making innovation appear as chaos. Successful management of such organisations lies in strategic allocation of chaos “crossing” among disciplines through the “Science of Complex Systems”. CETRA lasts 30 months and it is organised in 5 WP. The products of the project mainly consists on guidelines for e-learning courses design, curricula and courses design, a book containing up-dated didactic material on complexity and a web site containing a set of selected case studies and a selection of the relevant didactic material produced by the project. The project will end with an international workshop in Italy.