How an open EV-charging brief in Prague became a real-world prototype — and then a Czech Technical University master's thesis on smart-city data integration.
When Pratim Chakma joined his Demola innovation project in Prague, the brief was deliberately open: rethink the electric vehicle (EV) charging experience using real operational data. Months later, that same brief — and the same dataset — has become the backbone of his master's thesis at Czech Technical University in Prague, where he is completing the Innovation Project Management programme.
A co-creation platform now rooted in Czechia
Demola Czechia launched in the 2023/24 academic year drawing students from Prague universities to work with companies such as Porsche Engineering, Tietoevry, CzechInvest — and, in Pratim's cohort, Finnish EV charging technology company Kempower.
Each project runs for 8 weeks. Teams are built across faculties, universities and even nationalities, and the brief from the partner is intentionally broad: not a problem to be executed, but a space to be explored.
An open brief, a real dataset
For the Kempower team, that space was mobility — specifically, how to make EV charging better for drivers and more efficient for operators. Kempower offered something unusual for a student project: access to operational data from real charging sessions.
"In the first week we weren't even building anything yet — we were just sitting with the problem," Pratim says. "What does an EV owner actually need? What do they feel when they pull up to a charger? That's where we started."
The team was multidisciplinary by design, drawing students from different universities and disciplines. Pratim — whose background spans a bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering in Beijing, a master's in Data Science, and now a master's in Innovation Project Management — was the data scientist on a team built around user-oriented thinking.
"The easiest part was actually understanding each other," he says. "The hardest parts were time management, juggling different universities, competing ideas — and validating which ideas were worth the effort."
By the end of the project, the team had landed on a prototype mobile application that combined Kempower's session data with a user's personal calendar to predict charging needs and timing — a small but pointed answer to a much larger question.
From solution to research
For most students, that would be the end of the story. For Pratim, it was the start of a second one.
"Demola is more about the solution," he reflects. "The thesis is more about validating it and supporting it with deeper analysis."
With the encouragement of his thesis supervisor, Štěpán Chalupa, Pratim took the dataset and the open question into a year-long machine learning study "Optimizing EV Charging Experience Through Smart City Data Integration."
The thesis proposes a conceptual smart EV charging service architecture, with three innovation opportunities — real-time duration prediction, idle-connection management, and data-driven infrastructure investment prioritisation— organised into a three-horizon roadmap that moves from friction reduction, through dwell-time innovation, toward "invisible charging."
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In other words: the project results and demos the team created are now backed by a scientific big data analysis that supports decision-making and validates the results even further.
Why co-creation works when topics stay open
What makes Pratim's story inspiring isn't only the technical result. It's the path.
Demola's premise is that when companies hand students a deliberately open challenge — rather than a defined task list — the work sprawls in productive ways. A team of strangers walks into an 8-week project chasing "the EV charging experience" and may walk out with a calendar-integrated mobile prototype that helps customers to integrate EV charging into their everyday lives. One of the team members may use the same dataset as a basis for thesis on smart-city integration, AI connected services for other industry-wide problems.
"It's not only project management," Pratim says. "It's how you work with people from completely different backgrounds. That diversity is the thing that actually moves the project forward."
He's now thinking about where the work could go next. "I'm still figuring out where my career is heading, and these projects help me understand it better," he says. "What I know is that I want to keep working with EV charging and infrastructure”
For Demola Czechia and Kempower, that's arguably the best outcome a co-creation project can produce: not just a deliverable, but also a talent – a person who’s equipped with the latest work-life skills, deep multidisciplinary thinking and a real-world challenge that continues to inspire and has grown new branches worth exploring.
