Course syllabus

Course-PM

TEK761 Innovation and sustainability transitions lp1 HT24 (7.5 hp)

The course is offered by the department of Technology Management and Economics.

 

Welcome

Hello and welcome to the course Innovation and Sustainability Transitions!

We are delighted to work with you on this course, which is a project-based course that will give you an opportunity to collaboratively engage as an engineer in sustainability transitions and gain important experiences and skills to help prepare you for work life.

We have developed this course in dialogue with the city of Gothenburg. The government is responsible to address critical challenges related to the water infrastructure in this time of accelerating climate change. They are our main stakeholder and partner. As a coastal city with an important harbor, our city is facing an increasingly uncertain water situation, where projections suggest we will experience more extreme weather that puts pressure on our water supply systems. As you will learn a lot about in this course, the city is already trying to adapt to more common droughts, heavier rainfall, storms and raising sea levels that threaten to flood the low-lying parts of Gothenburg. These climate change-related challenges come with health risks, infrastructural damages, environmental degradation, and the need for adaptation measures. Engineers have an important role to play, but as the challenges transcend established sector boundaries and grow with time they demand interdisciplinary teams and ability to analyze the relationships between infrastructure, governance, finance, social aspects, well-being and environmental concerns.

Our city planners are working to adapt Gothenburg and the wider region to climate change, combining measures of prevention and adaptive response. As students of the Global Systems program, as well as other parts of Chalmers, we believe you are well placed to work with these types of difficult societal challenges and make a relevant contribution.

 

Teacher team and contact details

Our multi-disciplinary teacher team combines practical and theoretical expertise and will guide you in this process, but you will take lead and be given much freedom and responsibility to develop the projects in a meaningful direction. Along with Helene who is the main teacher, we have Sam and Sabrina as supervisors and course assistants. All three come from the Division of Environmental Systems Analysis. Also, we are extremely please to have an experienced climate change adaptation strategist from SWECO amongst us, David, who will guide you on the topic.

In addition, we have a number of guest lecturers who will make important interventions, amongst them senior engineers from the city authorities who work with Gothenburg's water infrastructure planning and adaptation. 

Main teacher, supervisor and examiner: Helene Ahlborg, Associate Professor at Environmental Systems Analysis, helene.ahlborg@chalmers.se

Course assistant, teacher and supervisor: Samuel Unsworth, PhD student at Environmental Systems Analysis, unsworth@chalmers.se 

Project supervisor and teacher: Sabrina Altmeyer Mendes altmeyer@chalmers.se  

Climate adaptation strategist: David Hirdman, SWECO, david.hirdman@sweco.se 

 

Course representatives

• To be announced

 

Course experts

Chalmers:

• To be announced

 

External experts:

• To be announced

 

Course purpose and why we work on projects

With this course, we aim to give you experience of working with research and practice related to innovation and sustainability transitions. We do so by working on a real case of adaptation in the city where we live, study and/or work. Engineers have many roles to play in processes of change and there are specific competences that are required for dealing with uncertain and complex situations. Securing access to safe, reliable and affordable water for all is one such complex challenge where the global meets the local, and climate change affects daily life in myriad ways. 

At the more aggregate level, we will introduce key concepts and ways of understanding processes of societal change towards "Sustainability" through the lens of complex systems and urban transitions. At the more detailed level, the course introduces methods and approaches to addressing concrete challenges related to such systems. Innovation is a key aspect of this and we will introduce you to ways of working with innovation in the face of uncertainty. 

Projects: We will work with real, challenging problems that need investigation. In the first two weeks, you will gain a broad overview of the complexity of water-related challenges and our stakeholders. As you start on your project it allows you to engage in exploration of and addressing a more specific and narrow problem. Each group is given a supervisor and our teachers and guests support your research of the problem at hand. We wish to take steps in the direction of not only understanding what the problem is, but also thinking about ways of addressing it, which is expected to result in a suggestion from each group on a strategy for how the city may handle it. You will meet with researchers who are experts on the topic as well as practitioner, and develop your project in the shape of a report that will be sents to the stakeholders. 

The course ends with a stakeholder conference in which you will present your project work to our stakeholders and to each other. The plan is for the students next year to learn from what you have done and continue to further explore challenges and possible solutions. Over time, we hope to make a real impact and help adapt our city to climate change. 

 

About language

We have chosen to work with a combination of English and Swedish in this course for the primary reason that Sam and Sabrina are international researchers. Course materials are primarily in English and the lectures will be a mix of Swedish and English. We can interact in Swedish when it doesn't exclude anyone. Many reports and online material are in Swedish, but of course there is a lot of international material in English. We will be pragmatic when it comes to language, but written examination will be in English for the group project and the exam. You can choose Swedish or English for the conference presentation.

 

Schedule

We use TimeEdit but also keep Canvas updated (look at the Module for each week) with date and time, and will use Canvas to announce any changes such that you can be aware of them. 

This course needs your presence, and the scheduled sessions provide key content, necessary for your progression in the course. It is not wise to miss out on scheduled activities, and we will write down who is present at "critical sessions".

Carrying out a project is work intensive and you need to be active from the start. It is expected of you that you spend in total 15-20 hours per week on this course. You should not do more than that as an average over the entire course period. That said, we understand that you all read one or two other courses at the same time, and there will be inevitable conflicts in the schedule. We must deal with this as a team and professionally. You are primarily responsible towards your project team and figuring out how your schedules conflict and how to help each other out to solve this is your responsibility in the team. 

TimeEdit

 

Course literature

We provide readings for each week and you are expected to read the literature. Some of it will support the project work, and some will prepare you for the exam. Some readings are mandatory to do ahead of critical sessions. This information is listed at Canvas and we alert you to this at the beginning of each week.  

Please check the module pages for all weekly lectures and activities at the beginning of each week. There may be some other resources listed by lecturers to accompany the lectures. Teachers can upload slides and materials on the module page, so check these also afterward. 

We also provide a wider database of optional readings and other resources for those students and groups who want to explore certain ideas more deeply. Since you will be doing research on different problems, this database will be compiled and grow over time. You can also add relevant materials that you find here - access it in "Modules" on Canvas.

 

Course design

The course is structured around lectures, exercises and a bigger team project focused on a complex sustainability challenge. You will be assigned into groups and given a problem to investigate and a supervisor. The project includes a variety of forms of collaboration, tasks and deliverables. The project is led to a high degree by you and provides experience of working with multiple approaches to problem formulation, data collection and mixed methods, analysis, innovation and communication. The project involves interactions with stakeholders in society.

 

Stakeholder interactions

Since our main stakeholders are very busy, we have a code of conduct for how we communicate with them. You will be assigned a contact person from the relevant city authority and all inquiries go through this person. It is really important that the stakeholders do not feel overwhelmed and stay committed to work with us. Therefore we kindly ask you to not (!) take own initiative on contacting government officials. You may however contact other actors, like relevant researchers, experts, private organisations and members of the public as part of your research investigation. Your supervisor will help guide you around interactions, so there is no need to start making inquiries ahead of the course. We will also provide suggestions for researchers you can get help from. 

 

Content

The course consists of: 

• 11 lectures 
• 12 interactive sessions, including supervision, exercises, workshops and peer feedback
• A boat trip with water experts
• A final conference with the stakeholders

We may need to make small adjustments to the schedule along the way.   

You will need your own laptop for the course, and many sessions are interactive so please bring it with you to class. 

We have also scheduled group work time starting from week 3 to give you time to jointly work on your projects and collect data. This time is used flexibly by the groups and for you to decide on what you need to work on. You will also need to spend time working with your group outside of class. 

 

Learning objectives and syllabus

Learning objectives:

After completion of the course, the student should be able to:

1. Apply skills in project management, communication and team work to complete a joint project that involves external stakeholders
2. Understand and explain the course's main concepts (sustainability transitions, innovation, technology and complex systems) and use these in analysis of and reflection around specific sustainability challenges
3. Apply a socio-technical framework for mapping and analysing a complex systems in terms of components, processes and functions, and identify threats to system sustainability
4. Develop a strategy for analysing an identified problem from multiple perspectives, using different methods for data collection
5. Explain the principles of different innovation approaches and apply these to a complex sustainability challenge
6. Compare examples of innovation and sustainability transitions in an international perspective

 

Learning outcome/ Course activity	1	2	3	4	5	6
Group Project and final conference	X	X	X	X	X
Skills training: professional skills for project management, communication with stakeholders and teamwork. Skills in presentation techniques. Research skills in how to carry out a research and development process, analytical skills in applying systems thinking, writing skills in preparation for thesis work.
Individual written exam		X			X	X
Skills training: Theoretical skills in reading and understanding academic literature, key concepts and applying these to carry out comparative analysis.

 

Link to the syllabus on Studieportalen.

Study plan

 

Examination form

The course is examined by evaluating a combination of individual and group performance. We use the scale F, 3, 4, 5. 

4.5 credits are for the group project and 3 credits are for the final exam.

We will publish instructions regarding the examination process for the final exam during the course.

To decide your individual grade for the group project, we do the following: 

 

1. Determine student has not failed the project

In order to gain an overall grade of P or higher, the student must have done the following:

• Attend and actively participated in at least 7 of the 11 sessions labelled as “critical” in the Canvas modules.
• Submit all written assignments. There are both individual and group assignments. Some of these are scored Pass/Fail and some are scored with grades (F,3,4,5).

If individuals or groups submit scored assignments after the deadline, they can only get a Pass (3) on that assignment (see weighted scoring in stage 2 below).

Since the course is built around a large group project, presence at all scheduled activities is important for your learning and the progress of the group.

 

2. Determine provisional score for each group project

For all those students who have not failed the course at stage 1, the assessors will set a provisional score for each student based on two of their group’s assignments: the group’s final report and the group’s conference presentation. We use a scale of four grades to determine a provisional score for the group project: F, 3, 4, 5.

These two submissions are used to determine the provisional score in the following way:

• Final group report – this assignment is the primary determinant of the group’s provisional score (F,3,4,5)
• Group presentation (visual and oral) at final conference: this assignment is used to validate or adjust the group’s score for the group report. The score for the group project may be adjusted up or down in cases of particularly strong or weak presentations, particularly if a group’s final report score was considered borderline (for example between a 3 and 4).
• Both of these assignments are assessed by at least two teachers and the teacher team engages in cross-checking to ensure the assessment is consistent and fair.

 

 

3. Determine final score for each individual student’s group project using peer feedback

To set the final individual grade for the group project, the assessors will review how each student’s contribution has been perceived by their group members, using the peer feedback document “Contributions to project work”.

The expectation for the majority of students is that this third step should not typically alter the provisional score for each individual student. However, it is possible that under specific circumstances, such as clearly positive or negative peer feedback, an individual student’s weighted score may be increased or decreased by 1 (1.0) point. For example, a student in a lower performing group (3) may be brought up one extra point if the peer review indicates this person carried a much greater weight than the group (4). In contrast, a student in a group that performs very well (5) but who receives very poor peer feedback indicating the person did little to contribute to the group effort may be adjusted down (to a 4).

In cases of extremely poor feedback from peers indicating the student has not contributed to the group work at even a minimum level of what is expected by teachers and peers, a student can be adjusted with more than 1.0 point or fail the project, even if the group passes.

 

Absence

About planned absence or absence due to cold symptoms: Communicate with the supervisor and your group members if you know you cannot participate in critical sessions. We will allow for online participation in critical sessions, but you need to organise this directly with your team members. 

We do not record lectures and do not plan for online lectures as presence is of importance in the course, and because hybrid mode adds to logistical complexities. We may provide an online link for the first Course introduction if there are good reasons to do so. Contact Sam well in advance if this is the case.