The aim is to introduce students to research projects and to strengthen their soft skills related to collaborative work. 

This course will be divided into two parts. The first part will be taught under a classical form (lectures, seminars) allowing students to acquire the necessary knowledge to successfully carry out the second part, were they will be asked to work independently to build their own collaborative research project.
Part 1: In an initial stage, the main research funding agencies (public and private) will be presented; the structure and management of collaborative research projects (timetables, milestones, deliverables…) will be also described. Several scientific experts will give seminars allowing grasping the contemporary trends and stakes of the discipline (chemistry and big data, the chemical industry 2.0, the chemistry at the interfaces…).
Part 2: In a second phase, students will be divided into groups of 3 to 4 people constituting a team. Several teams will be associated to form a consortium whose mission is to build a collaborative research project of a European type (FET-OPEN or RIA). Each consortium will have to structure, budget and justify its project using the planning tools and the ad-hoc methods.

At the end of the course the students, divided in groups will produce a written projects that will be evaluated by the reviewers and the mentors that followed the project, resulting in a global evaluation of the work presented by the groups of students. A presentation of the project will be done at the end by each group.

- Analysis and summary skills of the scientific production in a given field (publications, patents)
- Ability to develop a creative approach to solve a scientific problem
- Team building, Integration into a working team and ability to be a source of propositions
- Capacity to present the results under different forms (oral presentations, written reports…)

The delivery of the scientific final project depends on the skills that the students will develop during the course (Teams building, communication etc.). Therefore the two assessment are intrinsically connected.

The students, from different universities and nationalities will have to learn how to collaborate, overcoming difficulties and profiting of the advantages of working in a multicultural and multidisciplinar environment.

The delivery of the scientific final project depends as well on the behaviors that the students will be able to observe. Therefore the two assessment are intrinsically connected.