Social Responsibility and Innovation
How can innovation and social responsibility successfully be combined, resulting in sustainable, socially accepted products that succeed on the market?
30 students of the IDEA League universities, Chalmers University of Technology, TU Delft, ETH Zürich, Politecnico di Milano, and RWTH Aachen, participated in a competition surrounding the topic of “Social Responsibility and Innovation.” The students had to solve a task posed by the Adidas Group. To this purpose, the students were familiarized with “Design Thinking” principles. In an iterative process, the students developed a protoype, which they subsequently presented to a group of participating experts.
The Challenge
The IDEA League’s Challenge Program enables students to complete a program titled “Technology and Society.” The teams from the participating universities meet for a weekend to jointly work on application-oriented and real-world problems.
This year, the Challenge was hosted by the Gender and Diversity in Engineering Group headed by Professor Carmen Leicht-Scholten and the Technology and Innovation Management Group led by Professor Frank Piller.