This paper examines how a university and a corporate partner worked together in a substantial project with an ambitious sustainability goal and how, in the process, the university discovered new methods to achieve its own... [ view full abstract ]
This paper examines how a university and a corporate partner worked together in a substantial project with an ambitious sustainability goal and how, in the process, the university discovered new methods to achieve its own objectives as an innovative academic institution, capable of providing its students with knowledge and experiences that turn them into more innovative and socially responsible individuals.
The focus of the research is the use of an extracurricular, non-graded activity to renovate an environments where innovative thinking is learned and practiced. The research examines the experience of the Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes) team in the Solar Decathlon 2015 competition. The Solar Decathlon is an international university competition that was created in 2002 by the US State Department of Energy (DOE). Students are challenged to design and operate a full-scale, innovative and sustainable accommodation that uses solar energy. Projects are evaluated according to ten criteria in the fields of urban planning, architecture, engineering and construction, energy efficacy, communication and social awareness, innovation, house functionality, energy consumption and house comfort. The participation of Uniandes in the competition happened through an alliance with Codensa, electric utility company in Bogotá (Colombia).
Coached by one of the coauthors of this paper, a multidisciplinary team of 40 students, which set its own rules and practices for work, was able to harness support from their professors across the university and also from private sponsoring firms. Students went through an intense, 18-montn process, in which they were able to design, build and set up a sustainable house that complied with the demands of the competition. This paper applies a qualitative approach where detailed interviews were performed with the students after the competition was finished. The responses were classified and clustered with the purpose of discovering patterns of behavior, collaboration and learning among the students. The analysis of the experience shows that, within a context of autonomy and self-regulation, and faced with an ambitious goal that captures the imagination and inspires individuals, a team of students can work with scant resources and find creative solutions that may seem to lay well outside the realm of possibility. The process is described using the conceptual tools proposed by the theory of effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2001), where individuals recognize who they are, what are their resources and who they know, and generate a dynamic that takes over in unpredictable ways and generates results. The study identifies that the process was punctuated by clear crisis events, which put the whole enterprise at risk and forced individuals to take a grip on their innermost innovative capabilities. The paper is relevant in the ISDR conference as it shows how a university-industry alliance, called upon to make a contribution to an international competition on sustainability, served as a fruitful environment for a process which contributed to enhance a missional objective of the university, that of forming more innovative and responsible graduates, and revealed how it is possible to summon unpredictable resources that exist among the stakeholders of the university-industry ecosystem.
5c Sustainable Innovation and Transitions (zero emissions, new materials, recycling, IT, e
