LinkYou is a project co-financed by the European Union. Together with Latin America, it aims to improve the employability of young graduates by creating a network that seeks to bring together industries, academics and students through a mobile crowdsourcing application.

This service aims to contribute to the exchange of knowledge between academia and companies, and to attract private funds for research, thus promoting the spirit of innovation. The project intends to modernize the way research topics arise and reach students, as well as enhance employability through closer contact between academia and companies.

AppX had the opportunity to contribute to this project with its software development services using state of the art web and mobile technologies, making the “Challenge Academy” application a reality.

From companies to academia.

In a digital society characterized by the demand for new experiences by users, the academic world also seeks to reinvent itself and adapt to the agility of the market in the search for academic solutions to solve problems in the business world.

Through the platform, professional partners can challenge university students to solve concrete
business problems through research projects and master’s thesis. Professors and researchers can also take advantage of this platform, coming into contact with real business needs.

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Professionals

The digital platform allows professionals to propose challenges to the academic community, inspired by the concrete needs they encounter, while also encouraging contact with professors and researchers.

Teachers and researchers can validate the challenges applied by companies and create work groups, dissertation topics or related case studies.
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Teachers and Researchers

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Students

Students can find the challenges made by teachers and researchers and contact them to respond to these.

Tech solution.

The solution is based on a mobile application with a web administration backoffice. For the development, technologies based on Javascript and PHP were used, with MySQL data support.

A push notification system has been implemented so that all stakeholders are informed in real time of changes made to each of the challenges they integrate.
The platform was designed so that the maintenance of the code and the new developments are very simple. The entire data structure is maintained in easily changeable configuration files, with no need to modify the code base. Thus, the implementation of new data, languages ​​and layouts can be done only by modifying a set of configuration files.

Solution impact.

With dozens of partner companies and universities and hundreds of students registered in Portugal and Latin America, AppX is proud of the way this project has contributed to boost employability and bring private funds for academic research.