Abstract:

One of the major trends in management is the increase of focus on collective rather than on individual leadership. The leadership capacity increasingly spreads throughout the organisation rather than sit with one person or role (Petrie, 2011).

The value of collaboration and networks becomes even higher when it comes to innovation. Successful firms exploit innovations through collaboration and alliances outside of their current operations in order to generate value co-creation (Lin & Hsia, 2011).

The Strategic Framework for European Cooperation in Education and Training (European Council, 2011) has stressed the need for “enhancing creativity and innovation at all levels of education and training” and “improving the quality and efficiency of education and training in this matter”. Yet, there still remain questions with respect to the role of education in developing a solid set of interpersonal skills, such as collaboration and teamwork that can support students to co-create and co-innovate in networks of learning, instead of in isolation.

Promising approaches to develop interpersonal skills to support co-innovation are “adaptive learning methodologies” such as Problem-based Learning (PBL) and Design Thinking. PBL shifts the focus from teacher driven education, to student-centred learning involving active participation of learners (Braun & Mishra, 2016). On its side, Design Thinking approaches recognize that the learning path (or design path) starts on the concrete world with ill-defined problems, develops an understanding by means of observation, travels to a more abstract world based on insights and hypothetical solutions, and finally comes back to the concrete world with prototypes and a first set of solutions (Bechara & Piconez, 2017).

Based on the premise that “adaptive learning methodologies” have at the core the resolution of ill-defined problems, we hypothesize that when such methodologies are applied in cooperation with real business, students are faced with real problems, therefore, the degree of complexity of real problems triggers the need for collaboration and communication among students.

By taking the students perspective, this paper aims at understanding the effects of “adaptive learning methodologies” on the development of interpersonal skills (e.g. collaboration) from students. Using a database of more than 150 responses from students that participated in management and marketing courses applying “adaptive learning methodologies” in cooperation with Business from the region, in one of the largest universities of applied sciences in Germany, we attempt to provide empirical evidence on how and to what extent such methodologies can have an impact on the development of interpersonal skills for collaboration and co-innovation.

We complement our quantitative approach with a set of interviews with former students already in the work force in order to provide further evidence on the effectiveness of such “adaptive learning methodologies”.

With our results we aim at improving teaching and learning practices aimed at developing co-creation and co-innovation mind-sets and skills among students in management courses.

Keywords:

Co-innovation, Problem-based Learning, Design Thinking, interpersonal skills, soft skills, higher education, university-industry cooperation.