"MindUp allowed us to be very efficient in designing and creating a concept car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, by helping us to coordinate two teams of 12 students and several indutrial partners!"

The Context

The Energy Department of the Marseille Institute of Technology is very dynamic, staying at the top of innovation by creating and maintaining links with the best companies and labs in its field. This excellence is made visible by some of the ambitious projects it manages. "Pitchoun", one of them, consists in designing a car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell to run the next "Eco-Marathon Shell", a contest where the winner is the vehicle that could reach the furthest with the smallest quantity of energy.

MindUp was deployed late 2007 to help coordinate this project.

The Challenge

The team of students, professors and industrial partners was scattered and everybody had other activities in addition to this project. Therefore, succeeding in managing communications and actions inside the project proved to be a true challenge.

The Solution

Within a couple of minutes, with only the list of e-mail addresses of the stakeholders, the MindUp project workspace was created on Calinda Software's online server. In a few clicks, several groups were created to work on different parts of the project. From then on, all the e-mail discussions and attached documents taking place in the project were captured, centralized and structured in MindUp.

The Tangible Benefits

André Baltz, Professor at the Energy Department, testifies:

"Thanks to MindUp, all the project members were kept aware of everything that was taking place in the project. All documents were grouped and stored on the fly as they were being sent by e-mail, and a search engine allowed to retrieve everything very quickly. The result was considerable time savings, and some innovations that would probably not have emerged without MindUp to foster them."

"Another remarkable example: the students could, in a record time, create the materials to request fundings from the university. It involved many students who worked on the different parts of the file (ather price quotes from the providers, create a document to describe the project and team, design presentation slides, etc.). Not only it took them a fraction of the time, but they succeeded and managed to get the project fully funded!"

"Before this project, we never could take the time to set up collaborative tools in our projects, because it required people to make a lot of efforts to learn how to use them and change their collective habits. With MindUp, adoption was immediate, as everybody started by using their usual e-mail client, without changing their habits."