Building bridges over 18,000 km

For the month of June, the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Science (ENI) has hosted Senior Lecturer, Dr Christian Walsh, from the University of Canterbury (UC), Christchurch, New Zealand. During his visit we have been able to progress plans for several active collaboration projects.

In the upcoming semester we will have a global classroom initiative go live which will see students from Stuttgart and UC actively working together on „Creative Challenges” to run active experiments relating to the UN SDGs. With shared research interests, including intuition and creativity in innovation, we will also have combined research projects get underway initially with a masters project examining group intuition in innovation processes, and further industry based field research into innovation practices commencing in 2024.

During the month we were also able to attend the Startup Autobahn and Design Factory Showcase events, which highlight the strength of industry connections at Arena 2036. We also conducted shared visits to WU Vienna, and the Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France to explore future collaboration options.

Christian says, „This has been a very busy and productive month. We have been able to learn a lot from each other and progress our collaboration in teaching and common research areas. We look forward to continuing to collaborate and we hope this is the first of many such visits between our teams in future“.