Collaborative innovation: a study of creative teamwork in offshore industry and in design education

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is identified as a key activity to creating value to society as well as the successful adaption of the products and services to users’ lives. This is why entrepreneurship as concept is finding it’s way to the curriculum in higher education. To study how entrepreneurship is implemented through problem-based learning practice two case studies were conducted. The first case was from professional design practice including observation and cooperation process mapping in an offshore project. The key aspect of this project was commercialization of subsea seismic sensor technology. The second case was an example from product design education course module including observations of teamwork meeting, team member interviews and archival studies. The key aspect of this project was commercialization of a service. The concept of collaborative innovation, strategic entrepreneurship and problem framing was used to analyze and compare these two cases in order to study how entrepreneurship can be taught through problem-based learning and thus to identify relevant learning outcomes for project management in design education. While the first case study demonstrated how a company was establishing collaborative network to exchange expertise, the second case study showed how students were involved in idea and opportunity exploration process.