While companies and higher education institutions have different missions, structures and working cultures, there is great potential to generate mutual benefits through effective collaboration. Especially challenge-based learning offers an innovative approach to go about developing and implementing your university partnership and can bring many benefits for your company:

Turn a business problem you’ve identified into an opportunity by working together with university students excited to bring new ideas to your company. As a challenge provider, connecting to international students from a wide range of disciplines will allow you to receive different perspectives and fresh insights on sustainable business development. The knowledge and skillset that students and faculty provide can significantly help your company champion eco-innovation and advance sustainable business development. As a start-up, the cooperation can boost your incubation, acceleration and growth processes. In general, collaborating with students can help you employ more critical perspectives and might even inspire more creativity in your day-to-day work.

Collaborating with higher education institutions in challenge-based learning formats can form a strategic component of your sustainable innovation processes – especially when forging long-term partnerships. You benefit from receiving continuous access to the latest scientific advances and absorbing new knowledge and academic researchers’ leading expertise. Tapping into this wealth of knowledge and academic foresight also presents an advantage in that it helps you keep abreast of the larger-scale developments that will impact your sector specifically and the economy as a whole. In essence, you enter a two-way partnership in which both sides reap the benefits: while academics seek your business input to help solve real world problems and advance their research, you get the opportunity to increase your sustainable business success through accessing leading innovation and research and developing your internal capabilities and resources. Besides, you get to grow your network of trusted partners with whom you might discover and develop new formats and channels to drive science-industry collaboration.

By the time the challenge-based activity reaches its end, you are left with an array of new sustainable solutions to your business problem. Where used, these solutions hold the potential to rethink and transform your approach to sustainability and increase the positive impact your business activities generate for the environment and society. This can help you further maximise your impact, strengthen your reputation and build more trust among your customers. Other companies might be inspired to follow suit, encouraging more impact through collaboration between the higher education and business communities.

University collaboration can enhance company leader and employee development. As a company representative, working with students and academic staff can help you improve existing competencies and skills such as cooperation and communication with external actors. It can also stimulate you in terms of developing new knowledge and perspectives on sustainable venturing, and even reinvigorate your passion for innovation. The collaboration not only benefits employees directly involved in the challenge: a company-wide showcase of the results of your collaboration can provide other employees the opportunity to learn from the insights and ideas generated. This can serve as a source of inspiration for their own work and respective business field which in turn benefits the company’s learning culture and overall organisational development.

Higher education institutions are an important source of future employees. Working as challenge provider is a good way to build your employer brand and improve your visibility among the next generation of business leaders and sustainability innovators. You can get in touch with students directly who, after their studies, will potentially bring a wealth of new knowledge and skills into your company as new employees. Going beyond acquiring talent for graduate employment, developing and taking part in sustainable venturing challenges can also help you gain talent for internship placements, thesis projects and part-time student employment.

The transition to a sustainable economy requires bold, innovative solutions. Build on your students’ desire to drive real, sustainable impact and blend your sustainable entrepreneurship education with new forms of collaborative learning and teaching.

Inform & Prepare

Familiarise yourself with the components of sustainable venturing challenges

Sustainable venturing challenges require thorough preparation and planning. This entails becoming familiar with the evolving concept of challenge-based learning and getting to know the different features of sustainable venturing challenges. The following dimensions provide guidance as you decide on and select the right format for your students’ needs:

Providing a sustainable venturing challenge to your students can be energising for educators and company staff alike. However, challenge-based learning is a challenging pedagogical approach that requires additional effort in terms of involvement and time. You will engage in more roles than you might be accustomed to, flowing between these roles. The same goes for the business partner. As a result, it is important to develop a good understanding of the exact roles that you take on in a sustainable venturing challenge:

Teacher

As academic staff, you engage in transferring new knowledge to your students, especially as regards methods, approaches and tools for sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation. However, a major focus will be set on leveraging your students’ ability to use the knowledge acquired to develop innovative solutions for the real-world problems at hand.

Coach

You provide your students with support, guidance and direction throughout the entire challenge process, from defining the challenge and structuring essential information to ideating and developing solutions. At the same time, you make sure to give your students enough space to allow for creative and self-directed learning. Achieving this balance requires you to understand your students’ needs but also to encourage them to take on responsibility as challenge solvers.

Mentor

You engage your students and ensure their active participation and learning, aiding them in building a range of skills and future-oriented competencies which are essential for 21st century learning, such as critical thinking, collaborative work and intercultural communication. You motivate your students to actively experience each stage of the challenge process as well as reflect upon their experience. You might even inspire them to imagine themselves in careers or working with topics they have not considered before.

Facilitator

As academic staff, you represent the essential link between your students and the business partner and engage in managing and maintaining the challenge process. Essentially, you act as intermediary and ensure smooth collaboration and communication, both between students and company staff as well as between your students.

Connect & Co-design

Scout for suitable business partners

Finding a suitable company partner (or several partners) for your sustainable venturing challenge largely depends on your teaching concept and how you envision to design and deliver the challenge. But where to get started with your search for companies who can offer well-defined challenges to your students, in the first place? There are several possible ways to scout for suitable companies:

Check compatibility

Once you have identified a potential corporate partner, there are several key criteria that should be considered and cross-checked, and which, if met, lay the foundation for building a solid partnership, including:

Discuss requirements, set conditions and co-design challenge

Once you have identified a suitable corporate partner, you should enter into discussion of key requirements and together with your team, begin to prepare the challenge. To ensure successful collaboration, the following topics should form the basis for discussion:

Implement & Reflect

Implement the challenge programme or activity following the different stages of the challenge process

Student-business challenges in sustainable venturing will typically feature the stages shown below. In each of these stages, academic staff and business partners are involved to a varying extent. The business partners’ input during the kick-off of the challenge format is a necessary prerequisite for setting the stage and making sure that students can develop a sense of ownership of the challenge. Besides supplying information material about the challenge, it is advisable that academic staff provide student guidelines which detail the planned challenge procedure, important dates and if applicable, requirements for examination. The guidelines should also contain general information about the collaboration with the business partner and the expected role of students. Besides direct contact details of academic staff and business partners, lines of communication in case of conflicts should also be provided.

Depending on the level of engagement agreed on, the business partners make time available to act as coaches and mentors during the stages in which the students generate ideas and develop a concrete solution. As regards the learning process during challenges, the widely recognised Challenge-based Learning Framework formulates three interrelated phases: “Engage”, “Investigate” and “Act”. In the engagement phase, challenge participants explore the given problem and based on this, move towards formulating a challenge. The investigation phase involves in-depth research and analysis which result in multiple perspectives and new ideas. Refining these ideas leads to the final phase of action in which the participants eventually develop a concrete solution. During the presentation of the students’ solutions, business partners act as jury members alongside the academic staff and together, assess the proposed solutions on the basis of predefined evaluation criteria such as potential environmental and social impact, degree of innovation and implementation feasibility. 

Analyse data to evaluate and improve the challenge

In the evaluation stage, challenge outcomes are assessed to make improvements to the challenge format. “Have my students been able to develop their sustainable entrepreneurship competencies through participating in the challenge?”, “Have the company partners benefited from the challenge activity by acquiring new ideas?”, “Have any of the student ideas been implemented by the companies, and if so, what positive environmental, social and economic impacts are they generating?” – these are all essential questions to ask when evaluating challenge-based activities and programmes in sustainable venturing.

To be able to answer these questions in a strategic way, it can be useful to set up an accompanying evaluation and impact assessment system from the outset, including baseline assessments before the challenge is kicked off. This can benefit educators immensely by ensuring that:

• • • the challenge is designed along defined learning outcome and impact objectives
    • both academic staff and company staff can develop a common understanding of the challenge
    • the impact of the challenge is monitored and evaluated based on a set of indicators
    • it is clear which student ideas and solutions have either strengthened existing considerations within the company, provided new impulses, or have actually been implemented
    • the challenge can be improved with regard to efficiency and effectiveness
    • all involved, whether student, educator or company representative, can grasp the impact and meaningfulness of their commitment
    • the results of the activity or programme can be reported to a wider audience, increasing interest and participation of external actors, for instance with regard to scaling up the challenge to other programmes and universities

If you would like to get started on measuring and improving the impact of your challenge activity or programme, the “Guidelines for the evaluation of collaborative student-business venturing activities” are a suitable resource. The manual is aimed at both academic staff and company managers and introduces approaches to make transparent the costs, benefits as well as the outputs, outcomes and impacts of student-business collaboration schemes in sustainable venturing. It also shows how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing teaching and learning schemes, and provides insights on how to improve and develop them further.

By integrating sustainable venturing challenges into your curriculum, you help your students to complement theoretical learning with practice. Working on relevant, real-world sustainability problems in close collaboration with business partners will allow them to accelerate as well as deepen their learning. It can also significantly boost student motivation and commitment, because students get to apply their knowledge in real situations and through learning in relationships with both other students and business leaders.