Together with university-internal partners at TU Dortmund University (Prof. Flatten, Prof. Strese, JProf. Hensellek and the Center for Entrepreneurship and Transfer) and regional partners from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Prof. Winther, Prof. Stieglitz and Mr. Altenschmidt) and Ruhr University Bochum (Prof. Pöppelbuß, Prof. Meske and the Makerspace respectively the Worldfactory), the team of the Professorship for Digital Transfsormation innovates university teaching in the field of Design Thinking.

The consortium bundles its expertise within the University Alliance Ruhr in a joint framework program for design thinking courses at the universities involved. The existing resources of the project partners already offer great potential for the teaching and application of Design Thinking. The joint conception of an overarching module aims to achieve synergy effects and offer more diverse opportunities for student teams. Here, the central concept of mentoring is relied upon within a structured innovation process. Especially in the context of higher education, "Academic Mentoring" shows a great and positive correlation with performance, career as well as engagement. Our project provides for the linking of a continuous and expert-bound mentoring offer along the innovation approach Design Thinking. Students get the chance to work on challenges from practice and society in an entrepreneurial and interdisciplinary way. The digitization trend, but above all social and societal issues such as sustainability goals, offer great innovation potential.

The research project is funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre. The project duration is 12 months from 09.2022 to 08.2023.

Contact person for questions or cooperation offers is: Kay Hönemann