Today's global challenges require new thinking, new tools, and new approaches able to drive collaborative work and creation of value for all stakeholders. The co-creation of innovation between academia and organizations plays an important role in this context. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an impact assessment on the implementation of innovation co-creation methodologies in the academic-business context. This study examines how students and organizations can benefit from participating in innovation co-creation processes, using a Portuguese higher education institution (the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra) as a case study. The results give evidence that both students and organizations demonstrate high levels of satisfaction with the program and recognize that it is a powerful instrument to improve the effectiveness of academia–business collaboration and to promote the development of transversal skills which plays an important role in the educational process and in the growth of organizations.
Top1. Introduction
The growing complexity of current and future world challenges requires new approaches that allow multidisciplinary solutions and a more holistic vision. In this context, the frontiers of the classical areas of knowledge interconnect, giving rise not only to new fields of study but also new approaches to collaborative work and opportunities for partnerships and business, aiming the balanced integration of the economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Traditionally, knowledge was essentially produced in higher education institutions (HEI’s), and it was later transferred to the business and organizational sector. However, due to a multiplicity of factors, this approach leads to periods of knowledge transfer that are too long and poorly adjusted to the needs, challenges, and strategies of business organizations. Among these factors are the gap between academic technologies that still have no parallel in the large-scale market stands out, as well as the usual scientific dissemination which is mainly based on the publication of articles whose reading is not easily accessible to most economic agents.
In this context, and to overcome the aforementioned challenges, the adoption of more collaborative work platforms and the application of methodologies in which teaching, research and innovation systems are interconnected and articulated with regional, national and international economic dynamics are crucial. The knowledge triangle between research, education, and innovation (Raunio et al., 2018) is based on the HEI´s' strategy and performance and therefore on the skills developed in its students. However, some of the skills most valued today by employers (namely, analytical thinking and innovation; active learning and learning strategies; complex problem solving; critical thinking; creativity, originality and initiative; leadership and social influence; use, monitoring and control of technology; resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility; technology design and programming; reasoning, problem solving and ideation) are often under-stimulated in a still very traditional education system, characterized by inflexible curricular structures based mainly on teaching-learning processes by repetition.
The growing adoption of active learning methodologies has contributed to the transformation of higher education, modernizing it and bringing it closer to society. By importing the problems and challenges of business, institutional or social organizations into the classroom context, HEI´s allow a direct link between one of their main sources of innovation, their students, and society. Among the different methodologies, the Project Based Learning (PBL) teaching and the innovation co-creation processes stand out. While the first essentially aims at the development of a project that allows the resolution of a concrete problem, the innovation co-creation processes (which can be included in PBL methodologies) advocate the definition of future scenarios, stimulating creativity and innovation from speculative forecasts based on duly substantiated current trends (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). In the co-creation process, the focus is on how knowledge is used to create value (Mathisen and Jorgensen, 2021).