University of Twente Student Theses
Educational Innovation in Transdisciplinary Hubs : Microcosms of the Fourth Generation University
Dalen, Mats van (2024) Educational Innovation in Transdisciplinary Hubs : Microcosms of the Fourth Generation University.
|
PDF
10MB |
| Abstract: | In recent years, the notions of fourth generation university and transdisciplinarity have become prevalent in academic discourse on higher education. Exemplary of these two trends is that universities increasingly take the lead in the design, implementation, and governance of so-called ‘innovation labs’ or ‘innovation spaces’ where science and society meet each other to co-create value in academia and practice. While innovation labs are well-documented in the literature, the multiplicity of implementations in academic contexts highlights their practical ambiguity in universities. Therefore, this thesis will introduce the term transdisciplinary hubs: university-based physical spaces in which traditional disciplinary boundaries are being transcended, science and society learn and work together, and education, research, and valorisation are ‘modernised’. Specifically, this thesis aims to better understand how transdisciplinary hubs are designed, organised, and governed. It asked the following research question: “What are the key factors that shape educational innovation in transdisciplinary hubs?” To answer the question an extensive literature review was conducted and ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with key figures in and from two case studies. The results indicate that the transdisciplinary-, ecosystem-, and process focus, future-, community-, and proactive orientation, real-world context, the educational activities, -competencies, -experiences, -scaffolding, -stakeholders, and -collaborations, level of organisational autonomy, -resource availability, -strategic alignment, -organisational flexibility, -organisational constraints, -disciplinarity, -engagement, and -emergence, the location, scale, network, space, structure, culture, and mindset, the achievement of purposes and objectives, tangible- and intangible results, and materialisation of roles and functions of transdisciplinary hubs shape educational innovation. Ultimately, the findings suggest that the definitions in the literature of both the fourth generation university and transdisciplinarity need to be expanded. Fourth generation universities should also be characterised by their multirole hosting, facilitating, and leading of a wide and diverse range of educational, research, and valorisation initiatives and activities, and transdisciplinarity should also be characterised by the creation, development, and use of boundary objects based on prototyping and tangibilizing. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 85 business administration, organizational science |
| Programme: | Business Administration MSc (60644) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/103008 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
Show download statistics for this publication
Show download statistics for this publicationRepository Staff Only: item control page