P.28
education
Ciel Annual Report 2012
A laboratory for change At DTU, Associate Professor Anja Maier is developing a course that trains the ‘mental agility’ of students who are to work in a constantly changing world. It all started at CIEL’s ERA Kick-off Workshop; besides teaming up with other researchers on an ERA (Entrepreneurship Research Accelerator), Anja Maier learned that CIEL supports university teachers who want to develop courses in an innovative direction. This led to the idea of writing up a new teaching case about the current changes that are taking place in the way the product development process is organised at Oticon A/S.
“Most changes are ill-defined; you don’t know exactly what the solution is. To handle this and navigate the space of uncertainty is something that the students will learn.” Anja Maier Associate professor at DTU Management Engineering
Teaching change and innovation For a start, we asked Anja Maier how organisation and technolog y can be mixed in an innovative way: “Basically, the whole idea is to enable and sustain innovation by experimenting with how to cope with both emerging and planned changes. Hopefully, students who complete the course will have acquired mental agility in switching back and forth between different aspects. Collaborating partners get new ideas from the course, and students also get instantaneous feedback f rom t heir
Anja Maier, Associate Professor at DTU Management Engineering