Developing sensor technology innovations with business potential together with students: let's return to the master-apprentice approach

ID3AS is a programme in the field of sensor technology to stimulate innovation and network creation in the Eems Dollard Region (EDR), the most northern region along the Dutch-German border. The ID3AS-programme provided an opportunity for over 80 students with different backgrounds to participate on a scala of real world challenges. Real world learning environments like these are becoming increasingly popular in education, so it is important that we know how to organise the participation of students and tutors effectively. However, in ID3AS it proved challenging to realise a fruitful learning experience for the students, while simultaneously adding real value to the projects. The difficulty stems from the fact that both students and tutors struggle with the inherent unclarity of innovation projects, while at the same time industry partners need actual results. We think that the currently prevailing approach of the student learning by discovery, with the tutor in the role of process supervisor, is suboptimal in these conditions. Based on our experiences we propose to have students join a consortium as an 'apprentice’ to a ‘master’. The master, being a tutor from either university or company, should be comfortable with leading by example in an uncertain environment where both learning outcomes and concrete results are expected. We present several examples where this approach worked and give the outline of an experiment we plan to conduct on this topic.