CLIC-IT: Communities of Learning and Innovation in ICT to accelerate digital transformation

In the past decades, we have faced an increase in the digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation of our
work and daily life. Breakthroughs of digital technologies in fields such as artificial intelligence, telecommunications,
and data science bring solutions for large societal questions but also pose a new challenge: how to equip our (future)
workforce with the necessary digital skills, knowledge, and mindset to respond to and drive digital transformation?
Developing and supporting our human capital is paramount and failure to do so may leave us behind on individual
(digital divide), organizational (economic disadvantages), and societal level (failure in addressing grand societal
challenges). Digital transformation necessitates continuous learning approaches and scaffolding of interdisciplinary
collaboration and innovation practices that match complex real-world problems. Research and industry have
advocated for setting up learning communities as a space in which (future) professionals of different backgrounds
can work, learn, and innovate together. However, insights into how and under which circumstances learning
communities contribute to accelerated learning and innovation for digital transformation are lacking. In this project,
we will study 13 existing and developing learning communities that work on challenges related to digital
transformation to understand their working mechanisms. We will develop a wide variety of methods and tools to
support learning communities and integrate these in a Learning Communities Incubator. These insights, methods and
tools will result in more effective learning communities that will eventually (a) increase the potential of human
capital to innovate and (b) accelerate the innovation for digital transformation