SDG’s in Experts in teams

This case is anchored around the course “Experts in teams”, a 5th semester course at the Technological Faculty. It is a, 10 ECTS cross disciplinary course for most of the bachelor and diploma programmes at the technical faculty in campus Odense link to course descripton

The challenge – in short terms

Implementing SDG into an existing course; it is challenging for students for students to expand the program subject to a seamless integration of the SDG.
Furthermore defining a proper framework for the company cases is a challenge when students have to develeop company cases in their innovation processes during the course.

Student profile

Most of the bachelor and diploma programmes at the Technical Faculty in campus Odense
Usually students are on their fifth semester.

Course Caracteristics

The Course in mandatory
It runs with more than 500 students

The Entrepreneurship and Innovation related goals for the course

– In the course, students participate in a real innovation process. After the course, students should essentially be able to explicate how they can contribute to an (interdisciplinary) innovation process
– Considering the SDG’s is an integral part of innovation nowadays, and students of this course are asked to relate the value-creation of their innovation to the SDG’s

The vision of competences for students who have passed the course

Through experience-based learning, students should be able to reflect on: their own role in value-creation processes, what “value” is, how it comes about, the role of knowledge sharing and argumentation in value-creation processes, and the impact and importance of various stakeholders on value-creation processes.

The teaching format

EiT is experienced based learning. The students work in interdisciplinary groups of 5-6. The groups work with one of several challenges. Through lectures, the students are introduced to a small theoretical curriculum, but the main part of the “teaching” is through facilitation. “That” which we facilitate is the students’ explications of their learnings in the innovation- and collaboration processes.

The challenges

The course is constantly being developed. Recently, we have included the SDG’s as a natural/obvious “stakeholder” in our work with innovation processes. Including the SDG’s is, however, not trivial, and it seems to be difficult for the students to go beyond very basic considerations when we ask them to work with the SDG’s in their innovation process.
The course is based on real-life cases (e.g. supplied by companies). Despite some effort over the years, it is, however, still not completely clear what characterizes the “good” case.