AI-generated summary
Fuensanta Galán, a professor of Business Organization at Loyola University of Andalusia, emphasizes the importance of training students in innovation as a learnable, cross-sectoral skill. She led a recent initiative with Akademia and the Bankinter Innovation Foundation to deliver two hybrid sessions on innovation to students from the Innovation and Business class in the Communication degree. The program aims to bring practical innovation knowledge from industry professionals to university students, helping them discover how their academic skills apply to this dynamic field. Unlike the usual Akademia program with select students, this pilot involved a broader student audience to complement their formal education.
The sessions covered core concepts of innovation, current trends shaping society, and detailed insights into energy and telecommunications sectors as sources of new innovation opportunities. Students appreciated learning about these areas, which were previously unfamiliar to many. A notable feature was that the sessions were led by Akademia ambassadors—former students who shared their real-world experiences, making the content relatable and engaging. This peer-led approach boosted student involvement and helped make complex topics accessible. Based on the program’s success and positive student feedback, Galán aims to expand Akademia’s reach across more degrees, believing it effectively broadens students’ perspectives and inspires innovative thinking in just a few sessions.
Akademia brings the reality of innovation to Loyola University's Bachelor's Degree in Communication
“For me it is essential that students are trained in innovation. And I also believe that it is a subject, an activity, a skill that, first, can be learned and that is also transversal, it affects all sectors”.
These words are from Fuensanta Galán, professor in the area of Business Organization at Loyola University of Andalusia. Galán has led the latest initiative of Akademia to hold two sessions with its students from the Innovation and Business class of the degree in Communication.
Through Akademia, the Bankinter Innovation Foundation seeks to bring the most practical reality of innovation closer to university students so that they can discover how they can apply their own knowledge to an area as exciting and forward-looking as this one.
These sessions have been given as a new modality to bring innovation massively closer to university students. The usual Akademia program is carried out with a selected group of students. But in this case, Fuensanta thought that this program can be an exceptional tool with which to complement the learning of his subject.
“That there are professionals from outside the university, showing the student what they know, what they have learned, giving them guidelines, giving them tricks related to innovation, is fantastic,” he explains.
Diversifying knowledge at university
In addition, another of the great advantages offered by Akademia is precisely to diversify knowledge and offer innovative perspectives to different profiles. “For someone who studies Education, Communication, Business Administration, to be told about energy opens up a tremendous world,” says Galán. “An engineer, perhaps, has never thought about social economy and they discover many things, they learn a lot.”
These two hybrid sessions of Akademia focused, firstly, on what innovation is, what the latest trends are, how they drive the functioning and transformation of society; and second, in energy and telecommunications, the latest developments in the sector and how, in turn, they are generating new avenues of innovation.
The students of Fuensanta valued the learning in these subjects very positively, since “they have seen things of innovation, but most of them had no idea about energy or the importance of energy or telecommunications, they had never considered it”.
Alumni as Akademia Ambassadors
On the other hand, another of the most interesting points of this pilot program was the fact that the sessions were taught by Akademia ambassadors, former students who took the reins and went to the other side of the barrier to share with the new generation of students everything they themselves have learned with the Bankinter Innovation Foundation.
Pablo Florit, José Ramón Vilanova, Cristina Venteo and Fernando Alberca managed to connect with the students and they, in turn, enthusiastically received all their contributions. “Whata classmate tells them is more relevant than what a teacher tells them,” explains Fuensanta, “because the teacher, at the end of the day, is the teacher in the subject. When someone comes from outside, especially if they are classmates from the university, they are much more interested because it is someone like them who is telling them things they have learned, that they know. It has opened their minds a little.”
Participation has been one of the most successful factors in the students’ experience. They themselves tell it through a survey that was carried out after the sessions, and point to the importance of feeling involved in the sessions and that the contents are explained in an accessible way. The fact that the speakers have been former students adds value to the whole, since they themselves have gone through the sessions and know how to transmit knowledge in a way that is easily understood.
This pilot program has been so satisfactory for all parties that Galán is trying to replicate it in other degrees and subjects. He believes that Akademia is an initiative that all Loyola students can and should benefit from. “That opportunity to ask himself those questions, to have new questions open up in his head. Let them see that there are things they hadn’t thought of and that aren’t related. It seems to me that in two two-hour sessions the learning has been very high,” he concludes.
