Team formation in an interdisciplinary course with focus on entrepreneurship

• Main Author: Løje, Hanne
• Format: Other Non-Article Part of Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Arctic; Greenland; Sisimiut
• Online Access: https://orbit.dtu.dk/en/publications/ab41dcfb-a85d-427e-98ff-c2dd25e755c1

The objective of this study is to discuss team formation and team activities. We will give examples of team forming processes and team activities in an interdisciplinary course with focus on entrepreneurship. The study is a conceptual work describing our experiences and reflections regarding formation of interdisciplinary teams - we would like to discuss the topic at the conference. The purpose of the course is to introduce the students to entrepreneurship, to train an entrepreneurial mind-set and to enable the students to participate in entrepreneurial processes using relevant entrepreneurial tools and methods. The course consists of theory and work in practice where the students have to work together in interdisciplinary teams with real-life challenges offered by local companies. The projects are open-ended and real-life challenges observed by the company. The students are expected to investigate the challenges and to come up with solutions to the problems during the course by doing desk research, observations, and interviews with relevant stakeholders like users, customers, experts, company etc. The course is a three-week course held in August at the University’s campus in Sisimiut, Greenland. The students are primary from two Bachelor of Engineering programs, at the university Fisheries Technology and Arctic Civil Engineering. Furthermore, students from other educations are also invited to participate in the course. Our experience is that the time spend on the team activities are valuable and can avoid problems in the teams. However in the future we will have a higher focus on the team activity and include follow-ups on the performance of the teamwork.