Abstract
This paper presents a cross-course design and the underlying model and explains how we use explication of knowledge (Nonaka 1996) as a core element in both courses. The purpose of the courses is to foster entrepreneurship among engineering students at the Technical University of Denmark. For five years, the authors have run the two courses ‘Green Entrepreneurship’ and ‘Prototype Development’ in close collaboration and prepared the students for the internal university competition Green Challenge. Industry representatives, politicians, researchers and students judge the challenge. From 2015 to 2019, our students had eleven out of twenty-one possible top three rankings in the competition Whereas the two courses present the students to various theoretical concepts, they both facilitate the students to iterate in multiple loops, investigating the context, gaining knowledge, (re-) defining the problem, explicating proposals to an audience and retrieving feedback. We argue that one single factor why the students do well in the Green Challenge is the recurring explication where the students express their emerging understanding (Lawson 2005) of the problem in recurring pitch situations. For each new explication in the course, the students become more accurate in their communication, more conscious about the context, and reach a new level of understanding of the problem, as a solution emerges. The data behind this paper is student material presented throughout the two courses, the student’s final reports and the competition results. The paper is a conceptual paper that proposes a design for an entrepreneurial course with the recurring explications as the driver.
Info
Conference Paper, 2020
UN SDG Classification
DK Main Research Area
Science/Technology
