No abstract

The gap between industry needs and engineering graduates' competences is being tackled by project-based courses, which also help to develop key innovation competences to address current societal challenges. Nevertheless, there is limited understanding about what innovation competences are developed through the different types of project-based courses. This study discusses innovation competences development in these courses with the aim of understanding how to better design educational strategies to improve them. Through content analysis, we compare the outcomes of two groups of Telecom Engineering students undergoing a capstone course following a classical product development project approach and a challenge-based course using Design Thinking. Results show that both course types contribute to developing innovation competences. Nevertheless, depending on the chosen pedagogy some competences are developed further. The traditional project-based course demonstrates better results in Planning and Managing Projects. Creativity, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship are more developed through a challenge-based approach combined with Design Thinking.

No abstract

Despite the increasing interest in design thinking, there still is a lack of empirical understanding on what happens when design thinking, or elements of it, are adopted in organizations not accustomed to such approaches. Experimentation is one of the fundamentals of design thinking, and this study explores the impediments for experimentation in four novice design teams taking part in short-term experimentation sprints in a Finnish financial organization. This study adopted a case-study and action research approach and data was gathered through video-recoding and semi-structured interviews. Four central themes that may become bottlenecks when aiming to adopt experimentation in novice teams were identified: resistance to iteration, overlooking the experimentation ideas of others' and oneself, losing sight of the initial problem to be solved, and a bias towards planning. The study showed that adopting experimentation, in novice design teams requires the team to adopt an appropriate mindset that is open for modifications in the idea and for iteration in the experimentation cycle.

Individuals are at the heart of innovation, and their innovative behavior is influenced by their ability and willingness to be innovative. Experimentation is a key activity in innovation. An individual's experimentation behavior - the behavior towards designing, executing and learning from experiments - can be seen as a subset of innovative behavior. Yet, previous research has largely overlooked the level of an individual when studying factors influencing experimentation. This paper investigates how characteristics of an individual promote their experimentation behavior. To understand experimentation on the level of an individual, 18 individuals working in five short-term innovation projects adopting experimentation were selected for this explorative study. Data was collected from multiple sources, through action research. The results of the study suggest 12 characteristics of an individual that promote the experimentation behavior of individuals who are involved in experimentation for the first time, in specific ways at the different stages of the experimentation cycle.