The Student Creativity Program (PKM) is a program established by the Directorate General of Higher Education through the Directorate of Learning and Student Affairs (BELMAWA Directorate) under the Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education (Kemristekdikti) of the Republic of Indonesia. It aims to facilitate the creative potential of Indonesian students to study, develop, and apply the knowledge and technology they have learned in college to the wider community, with the support of funding.
In general, the Student Creativity Program (PKM) aims to prepare future-oriented human resources who will become graduates that are excellent, competitive, adaptive, flexible, productive, and competitive, with the values of Pancasila character.
Types of Student Creativity Programs:
1. PKM-P (Research): Aims to uncover facts or phenomena through a scientific approach, fostering interest and research skills, as well as understanding research methods and data analysis techniques. Through this program, students are expected to produce high-quality research with the potential to be published in scientific journals and to generate patents that benefit both the academic community and society at large.
2. PKM-K (Entrepreneurship): A program aimed at developing students’ entrepreneurial skills with a profit-oriented focus. The business commodities produced can be goods or services, which serve as a foundation for students to start businesses and enter the market. In this case, the main actors in entrepreneurship are the students, not the community or other partners.
3. PKM-M (Community Service): A program for applying knowledge, technology, and arts in non-profit efforts to help end poverty, reduce inequality, and protect the environment. Partners in PKM-M are non-profit communities such as educational institutions (both formal and informal), government agencies, youth organizations, PKK groups (Family Welfare Education), orphanages, or other social institutions.
4. PKM-T (Technology Application): A program with the main goal of encouraging students to step outside the campus to observe various needs or problems in productive communities and to provide the scientific and technological solutions needed and desired by partners. The goal of PKM-T is to motivate students to actively engage in building professional networks with the business world, to identify partner business problems or needs, and to find solutions based on science and technology that are ready to be applied.
5. PKM-KC (Constructive Creativity): A platform for students to realize constructive ideas based on creativity and reasoning, even though these ideas may not yet provide perfect functional value or direct benefits to others. PKM-KC products must be at a ready-to-use and functional scale or at least in a prototype stage ready for testing. No further research related to product design and development is allowed in this program. PKM-KC emphasizes originality of ideas or at least modification of existing products, not the use or application of existing works.
6. PKM-GT (Written Ideas): A program for writing scientific articles based on the ideas or concepts of a group of students. The ideas written should address current issues in society that require intelligent and realistic solutions derived from thoughtful reasoning.
7. PKM-GFK (Futuristic Constructive Ideas): Aims to motivate student participation in managing their imagination, perception, and reasoning, thinking about futuristic yet constructive governance as an effort to achieve the SDGs in Indonesia or provide solutions to the nation’s concerns. It all begins with an ‘idea,’ followed by a ‘narrative,’ which is eventually manifested into a ‘creation.’ The goal of PKM-GFK is to cultivate the habit of students being concerned with national issues, reflecting, discussing, and finding ideas to address or improve these issues, and then constructing them into written form.
8. PKM-AI (Scientific Article): A PKM scheme that primarily aims to assist and provide a platform for Indonesian students to write scientific articles based on academic activities they have completed. Unlike the other six types of PKM that involve physical activities in laboratories or the field, PKM-AI does not involve such activities. While the other PKM types require student groups to submit project proposals to the BELMAWA Directorate, for PKM-AI, student groups only need to submit written work in the form of a scientific article online. The work must be based on activities that have already been completed by the student group and have never been published in scientific media or submitted to a competition.
