Pixel International Conferences

Digitization is changing the business world; digital technologies are affecting competencies, methods and opportunities in the business place. Competencies such as innovative spirit, analytical strength, customer orientation, team spirit and personal responsibility are becoming more important than ever. Universities teaching business students must ask themselves: How should a future oriented teaching concept in business administration - besides theoretical lectures and case studies – be structured? How can innovative tasks and experiences be integrated into a course? How do lectures at universities include to cutting edge business-relevant challenges and questions?
In the “Co-Innovation Lab” at the Munich University of Applied Sciences, companies work together with students in project-oriented courses on future innovations. This lab serves as a common development environment for innovation projects. Students change from discussing case studies to interact with business reality through projects and experience as well as develop new approaches to solving complex business problems.
Teaching in the Co-Innovation Lab is characterized as multi-dimensionality, self-activity and cooperative learning in projects. Companies receive innovations from and for an often little known target group and meet their potential employees of tomorrow. In the paper we use the example of "Brainnovative Consulting" (a lab stream based on the Co-Innovation Lab concept) to show how students carry out projects on their own responsibility. Brainnovative Consulting (www.brainnovative-consulting.de) is a student management consultancy integrated into the curriculum of the Master Programs “Digital Technology Entrepreneurship” and “Applied Business Innovation”. The student projects include the discussion of a proposal with a target formulation for the cooperating companies, project planning, implementation to completion and reflection on current innovation topics. The students cover the entire lifecycle of a consulting project from acquisition, delivery to knowledge management and deepening their competencies during that activities. In addition to organizational topics such as project acquisition and corporate support, lecturers are responsible for coaching the teams.
In the future, in addition to the current version of the Co-Innovation Lab with focus on the topics of innovation consulting, process mining and business process management, we will add further topics, improve the project infrastructure, integrate further disciplines and increase the accompanying research.

Keywords: Project-based learning, customer-orientation, innovation;