Just an Aluminium Trolley - A Case within the Frame of Problem-based Learning: Linking Strategy, Innovation, Product Development and Design in a Dynamic Concept between the Academic and Professional World

摘要

This paper presents what an engineering school at a university may do to stimulate engineering excellence. Problem-based education methods in connection with project and group-organised studies as a link between the academic and professional world is presented in the frame of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design curriculums. Innovation as suggested is the creation of a new product-market-technology-organisation-combination (PMTO-combination) consisting of three key elements: 1) Innovation is a process and should be managed as such, 2) the result is at least one new element in the company's PMTO-combinations. 3) The extent to which the innovation is new may range from incremental, small step innovation, through synthetic innovation, i.e. the creative recombination of existing techniques, ideas or methods, to discontinuous, radical, quantum-leap innovation. Often new means: new, somewhere on the continuum. The company in this case - a very small business - wanted just an aluminium trolley.