On February 23, 2018, PEACE Student Exchange Program of Hiroshima University organized, in cooperation with the University of Münster (Germany), a PEACE-SDGs Ideas Mining Workshop.

The PEACE Student Exchange program has set as one of its primary goals to build students’ “Social Planning Capacity.” To that end, we consider ideas mining workshops as a very effective educational method because they are designed to allow the participants to turn their abstract ideas into concrete action plans while facilitating participants’ creative thinking through a variety of educational techniques. The 8 hour long workshop also served as a great opportunity for some HU faculty members to acquire the knowledge and skills underlying the ideas mining method, which was originally developed by the University of Münster.

The participants consisting of HU Japanese and international students, with the help of moderators (instructors), intensively discussed an aspect of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, namely “Quality Education” (for all) (Goal 4), experiencing a variety of ideas mining activities designed to increase their creativity and capacity to generate ideas.

Since some of our faculty members received through the workshop the intensive train-the-trainer training by idea mining experts from the University of Münster, we are now officially allowed to organize ideas mining workshops on our own. Potential future applications may include but not limited to offering workshops to involved faculty/staff members for capacity development purposes and to local companies or public organizations for finding solutions to their problems.