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Extant research into the efficacy of—especially interdisciplinary—higher education for sustainable development (HESD) is limited. A need exists to investigate students’ development of sustainability knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours. Furthermore, universities have experienced difficulties implementing interdisciplinary HESD because of organisational barriers due to monodisciplinary structures, as well as educators’ and students’ reservations. This study introduces an interdisciplinary approach to HESD and investigates its efficacy regarding students’ development of sustainability knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours at a university in Germany. The approach applies a series of lectures by different sustainability experts accompanied by several tutorials that support students’ interdisciplinary learning and teamwork towards an interdisciplinary sustainability product. Tutors were trained in interdisciplinary teaching methods, as well as interdisciplinary communication and conflict management, beforehand. Before participating in the interdisciplinary course, the students had a moderate level of sustainability knowledge and behaviour, and a high level of sustainability attitudes. The results from the pre–post-test analysis indicate an increase in students’ sustainability knowledge and behaviours, and no change in students’ sustainability attitudes. If typical barriers to interdisciplinarity are mitigated, interdisciplinary HESD can facilitate students’ development.

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Innovative ideas are essential to sustainable development. Students’ innovative potential in higher education for sustainable development (HESD) has so far been neglected. Innovation is often associated with an interdisciplinary approach. However, the results of research on diversity and its role in innovation are inconsistent. The present study takes a longitudinal approach to investigating student teams in project-based learning courses in HESD in Germany. This study examines how innovation develops in interdisciplinary student teams in contrast to monodisciplinary student teams. The results of the latent change approach from a sample of 69 student teams indicate significant changes in students’ innovation over time. Monodisciplinary student teams outperform interdisciplinary student teams in idea promotion (convincing potential allies) at the beginning, whereas interdisciplinary student teams outperform monodisciplinary student teams in idea generation (production of novel and useful ideas) in the midterm. There is no difference in the long term. The results indicate that interdisciplinary student teams have an advantage in the generation of novel ideas but need time to leverage their access to different discipline-based knowledge. We discuss practical implications for the design of interdisciplinary learning with strategies to support students in the formation phase in project-based learning in HESD.

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