Innovation in Engineering

Innovation competencies are crucial for future engineers to invigorate new perspectives, particularly to nurture and drive global change in tackling the societal, environmental and health-related challenges we face.

Through the course, students acquire applicable experiences and competencies with a systematic approach to innovation in an engineering context. Students are required to develop unique insights into how integrated innovation is practised. They will experience and face challenges with multidisciplinary collaboration while working on a real industry challenge. Each project team will also be assigned a team facilitator (which are students who are taking the course 'Facilitating Innovation in Multidisciplinary Teams'). These facilitators have attained innovation competencies and will guide the team during all project work. With a facilitator at hand, the team will have a 'catalyst' to increase 'Innovation Height'.

The course is organized into two main parts. The first week - the BOOST module - is focused on engaging the students with the topic of innovation by an array of speakers, and introducing students to a systematic approach to innovation, including relevant theory. At the start of the first week, the students will be put into project teams based on their chosen innovation challenge as well as their line of study et al.

In the second and third weeks - the EXPERIENCE module - the teams's focus is on developing an innovative solution in collaboration with their facilitator. This should result in a concept that must be presented to the stakeholders at the end of the process.

The course consists of lectures, reading material, team exercises, assignments, peer-reviews and multiple-choice quizzes. The learning activities and submissions are team-based experiences and for that reason, it is important to participate in class at DTU Campus

The course introduces students to apply competencies and methods to enable innovation in engineering within multidisciplinary teams. Students will:

• Understand how to follow and apply a structure innovation process to a real-life engineering challenge
• Experience the varied innovation landscape by navigating and applying their skills in it
• Contribute with collaborative initiatives in a team context to allow new perspectives
• Combine their disciplines through various methods in a facilitated innovation process
• Acquire the DTU's signature Innovation Mindset and application of multidisciplinary teams
• Be able to communicate key findings to relevant stakeholders and adjust from their inputs
• Acquire a toolkit of structured methods to increase the innovative probability
• Create new solution-oriented ideas and mature these into a final concept proposal

The course is a mix of teamwork, exercises, lectures on campus as well as video lectures and assignments. The teamwork is expected to take place on campus for the entire duration of the 3 weeks. The course cannot be taken as an online course. See learning