Collaboration between two innovation courses enhances students’ understanding of organisational context

The present paper presents the results of an experiment of close collaboration between two courses at the fourth semester at the bachelor programme ‘Process and Innovation’ at Technical University of Denmark. The two courses are Innovation and Knowledge Management (IKM) and Innovation in an Organisation Context (IOC). Design-based learning had been use as a learning philosophy in both courses. The aim of the collaboration was to prevent premature closure of the problem definition, when engineering students engage in innovation and design processes. The two courses shared six hospital cases, and the students did initially conduct an in-depth organisational analysis of a hospital department in the IKM course, followed by problem definition and an innovative process in the IOC course. The case partners answered with some variation that the students had understood their organisational context and that the solution they proposed had taken the context into consideration e.g. economic issues and understanding of the problem they solved. For some of the case partners it was not only the final solution that made value, also the initial analysis and the discussions about the organisational context and problems gave inspiration for the case partners.