BRIDEE – BRIDGING DESIGN AND ENTRPRENEURSHIP IN EDUCATION
Year: 2013
Editor: John Lawlor, Ger Reilly, Robert Simpson, Michael Ring, Ahmed Kovacevic, Mark McGrath, William Ion, David Tormey, Erik Bohemia, Chris McMahon, Brian Parkinson
Author: Baelus, Chris; De Grande, Guido; Jacoby, Alexis
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Antwerp University, Belgium
Section: Design Education and Business
Page(s): 512-517
ISBN: 978-1-904670-42-1
Abstract
Design and design thinking is being recognized as a valuable approach in business development. Embedding its principles in the curricula of business schools can provide deeper insights to the various stakeholders such as customers, clients and suppliers and result into more creative and innovative business plans. Various pilot projects indicate that combining the potential of business and design students by bringing them together in interdisciplinary project teams results into better learning curves and project results for both business and design students. This approach can stimulate the drive for entrepreneurship and lead to an improved and extended valorisation of studentâs projects by actually creating start-ups. Based on these findings a pilot project BRIDEE (Bridging Design Entrepreneurship and Education) was set up in 2012 in Flanders to stimulate the cross fertilization between business and design education. Therefore a co-creation platform was created to bring students from Vlerick Business school, an international MBA program, together with students of the Master program of product development of Antwerp and the ID engineering program of HoWest. The project was based on a similar collaboration between Imperial College Business School and Royal College of Art in London and managed by the same business coach. Woowoos, a creative incubator was engaged to organize the digital platform and the interface with industrial stakeholders. The goal is to create a win-win situation for all parties. Business students are introduced into a creative, user-centred design approach and learn the value of design in the development of business plans. For designers, it is an opportunity to share business know-how and entrepreneurial skills and to expand insights on financial issues related to valorisation. Students form interdisciplinary teams to turn ideas into practice by creating product and services in line with business plans for valorisation and commercialization. Workshops are organized to share knowledge, approaches, tools and skills for the other disciplines. Each team is coached by business academics and design coaches during a period of 5 months. The final result is a business proposition that is presented for and rated by a jury of business experts and designers. This papers describes the approach followed and the results and learnings from various perspectives (business students, design students, ideator) and formulates recommendations for the second edition of this pilot.
Keywords: Interdisciplinary teamwork, business case, design thinking, entrepreneurship, product development