Curricula of the Doctoral Schools of the University of Lodz make it possible for the doctoral students to obtain qualifications at an advanced level not only in terms of the doctoral thesis realization process but also with respect to professional training (strengthening the research workshop and raising competence within didactic work) and personal development (soft skills, including training the skills of active career planning and development in the field of creative problem solving). Those skills are necessary not only to successfully complete education at the Doctoral School but they are also crucial for professional career development. Simultaneously the education curricula allow for interdisciplinary research. Education in each Doctoral School takes 4 years.
Industrial PhD Programmes constitute a unique opportunity for the employees of Łukasiewicz Institute to combine professional activity with scientific work.
- Within the Institute I am the chief specialist in the department of commercialisation. I take part in the process of acquiring new business partners, being an advisory body at the stage of looking for possibilities to fund research work and negotiating contracts. We organize and participate in national and foreign fairs, economic missions and exhibitions. Moreover, I am a manager of an investment project containing commercialisation component. Last year I obtained a second level certificate of knowledge of the TRIZ methodology - says Grzegorz Sowula.
He also adds:
- I believe the Industrial PhD programme is a valuable initiative, in line with the theories concerning an increase in innovation. They indicate creating connections between various fields of knowledge as one of the ways to achieving innovation. In case of such a doctoral thesis, a practitioner in his/her field has a chance, with assistance from a Supervisor-Master, to perform accurate research and analyses that are useful in professional work. In my case, my doctoral thesis is a great opportunity to look for solutions of problems that I have diagnosed in my everyday work in the commercialisation cell and to gain knowledge I am going to share with scientists performing projects in our Institute. I’m also counting on support of other scientific employees of the University of Lodz, which is a renowned unit in Poland, with respect to theory and practice of commercialisation of research work results.
Based on the experiences from numerous meetings with entrepreneurs, as well as on the knowledge within the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), Grzegorz Sowula is planning to analyse commercialisation processes in the Institute. He wants to implement the results as part of projects and procedures, and to disseminate them among other units of the Łukasiewicz Research Network.
In Łukasiewicz - the Institute of Microelectronics and Photonics (IMIF), just like in all institutes of the Łukasiewicz Research Network, the Programme arouses considerable interest. Its participants perform implementation works at their workplaces and just like all doctoral students, they take an active part in the classes organized by doctoral schools and participate in research projects.
In 2020 four young employees of Łukasiewicz – IMiF: Krzysztof Grąbczewski, Grzegorz Kołaszczyński, Piotr Maćków and Grzegorz Sowula joined the Industrial PhD. They will realize their doctoral theses in the leading scientific units – AGH University of Science and Technology, Warsaw University of Technology and at the University of Lodz.
University of Lodz is one of the biggest universities in Poland. Its mission is to educate top-class scientists and specialists in numerous fields of humanities, social sciences, natural and exact sciences as well as health sciences. UniLodz cooperates with business, both at the staff level by providing qualified employees as well as at the scientific level, by offering its know-how to enterprises from various areas of economy. University of Lodz is an academic institution open to the world – the number of its international students is constantly growing, while its Polish students, thanks to Exchange programmes, get to know Europe, Asia and travel overseas. The University is a part of Lodz, it operates for and with the community of Lodz by getting involved in many socio-cultural projects.
Source: Grzegorz Sowula, the Łukasiewicz Institute
Edit: Promotion Centre, UL