Large scalable workshop for innovation and entrepreneurship

This paper describes several years of experience in planning and implementing an interdisciplinary Workshop For Innovation and Entrepreneurship (WOFIE) where design students develop new solutions and business plans in collaboration with graduate students from social sciences, human sciences and other technical disciplines. The project is a strategic initiative with the aim of strengthening the university students’ ability to develop new products and business models in relation to societal and environmental needs and challenges. The paper describes tools and methods to handle such projects with many pedagogical, cross-disciplinary, logistic and administrative challenges in executing such a large-scale workshop on multiple locations with students from different disciplines. Until now workshop has been carried out using a strict sequential phase orientated pedagogical approach, which analyses of the evaluations has pointed out as a problem. On that basis it has been decided that future workshops are based on an activity orientated pedagogical approach, where activities are executed, when it is relevant regarding contribution to the result for the individual group. The developing of the WOFIE methodology has been done under the following dogmas: 1) Asynchronous process between the groups, 2) A qualified progress outlined for supervisors and Location Leaders. The author of this paper has been part of a development group restructuring the approach into to an activity-based matrix combining a sequential perspective with a semi autonomous asynchronous supervision perspective with the possibility to adapt and iterate when necessary.