Design-driven ednovation: How interdiscplinary education from design and business program can bring university R&D to society

Abstract

This research aims to explore the mechanism of design-driven ednovation (education innovation) to identify how interdisciplinary education from design and business program can bring university R&D to society. Today's research challenges in university already changes because the new ill-defined problems often exceed the abilities of any one discipline, which means that experts from diverse fields must work together to provide a range of problem-solving perspectives. To enhance the problem-solving mechanism in interdisciplinary research projects and identify real problem or humanity demands from the real society, thereby commercializing the R&D outcome, design thinking perspective is already adopted to create the linkage from the engineering to business discipline. Some new arguments also raised that innovation outcome guided by design thinking process has come to complement the market's view that, in order to innovate, one must focus on the development or integration of new technologies and on opening and/or servicing new markets. As a result, this research adopts a participant observation approach to conduct a case study of design-driven ednovation program at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan to show the findings regarding the facilitating role of design-based program and the proposed operational model to diffusing the university R&D for humanity.