A music festival as innovative living-lab learning in engineering education

Innovation and entrepreneurship is high on the education policy agenda and conse-quently also in engineering education. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) does a significant effort to establish a variety of opportunities by encouraging their students to work with project development and entrepreneurship. As a part of their education, DTU students is offered the opportunity to work with the organizers at Roskilde Festival (RF) with a broad range of real-life engineering design challenges (RF is a large music festival with about 100.000 visitors and 32.000 volunteers).
This paper outlines the collaboration framework between DTU and RF; a living-lab learning platform developed between the two organizations. More than 650 engi-neering students have participated between 2010 and 2017. The collaboration pro-vides a unique context for students to conceive, design, develop and implement their own ideas. Our research is based on analysis of data and results from student pro-jects aggregated between 2010 and 2017. In this paper we have a special focus on projects exploiting a commercial potential and present cases of student entrepre-neurship realized through festival projects. Furthermore, we have analyzed the char-acteristics of the cross institutional setup that supports, coordinates and facilitates the platform.