Challenge-Based Learning and Entrepreneurship education in Computer Science: building distributed bridges between Universities and Companies

In this article, we discuss how a Master’s course in Innovation and Entrepreneurship for computing students evolved in three steps: from a “minor thesis”, to what might be called a somewhat standard CBL course, and finally to a more sophisticated “cross-university” or “distributed” setting, where students from multiple universities work on shared challenges, often provided by companies from all over Europe. The long time frame of the discussion highlights in particular how the course “ran ahead of the curve” in terms of use of digital tools that would become familiar to most only because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how that same advantage created challenges in the transition back to presential teaching. Our work aims to give a first look at how, using the same broad design process, courses can become small-scale models of many of the challenges of the enterprise space and tools to create connection between innovation ecosystems.