About Engage
About Engage
The world is constantly changing, with increasing pace and intensity. These changes have profound consequences for human life—for the climate and environment, technological opportunities, business practices, public policy, safety, education, and society as a whole.
This complex environment calls for citizens who have the ability to identify challenges, the will to act upon these challenges, the knowledge to acquire the resources and skills needed and the confidence to be the driving force for change, regardless of resistance. These people are the agents of change, the entrepreneurs, willing and able to make changes, engaging challenges with creativity and fearlessness.
The ambition of Engage is to develop students’ entrepreneurial skills at the higher education level to become change agents in all contexts.
About the organization
Engage was founded in 2017, and is a consortium consisting of the NTNU School of Entrepreneurship, Nord University Business School, NTNU Experts in Teamwork, TrollLABS and Spark NTNU.
NTNU School of Entrepreneurship (NSE) is a two-year master degree program offered by the Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management at NTNU, with a focus on business development and technology-based entrepreneurship.
NSE´s vision is to educate the best business developers in the world, and the purpose is twofold:
To provide a state-of-the-art educational program to students seeking a career within entrepreneurship and commercialization of technology.
To contribute to the commercialization of ideas from the technology community at NTNU and other innovation communities.
Established in 1985, Nord University Business School has grown continuously and is today the leading educator of management personnel to the business community in Northern Norway.
Nord University Business School provides courses and specializations in entrepreneurship at the Bachelor, MBA, MSc, and PhD levels, and has a strong research community within the field of entrepreneurship.
Spark* NTNU is a mentoring service by and for students with a business idea. It is a free service for all students at NTNU were they can register their idea and get appointed a student mentor that will help them reach the next step to try to help bring the idea to life.
The main goal of Spark is to introduce as many students as possible to the idea that commercialization of an idea is possible.
TrollLABS is a research and prototyping laboratory, established in 2014. In time of technological and social discontinuities, the capability of a company to generate radical new products, services and systems becomes critical.
TrollLABS is aiming at understanding the development of radical new ideas in the very early phases of product development – the early fuzzy front end.
Experts in Teamwork (EiT) is a master’s degree course in which students develop their interdisciplinary teamwork skills. The course is compulsory for all students in master’s programmes and programmes of professional study at NTNU.
Together these five partners contribute with variations in action-based, challenge-based and experience-based learning models as a basis for interdisciplinary interactions and complementary skills and approaches. This is a strong foundation for developing entrepreneurial skills among students in different disciplines. The centre host is NTNU faculty of economics and management.
The organization of the centre
The centre has management group and is organized in five working packages (WP).
DEVELOPING COLLABORATIVE SKILLS IN INTERDISCIPLINARY TEAMS (WP1)
WP1 explores in depth the elements that characterize collaborative skills in interdisciplinary teams, methods for acquiring collaborative skills in an experience-based context, and ways of assessing these skills among students. The main objectives of WP1 are to develop methods and approaches to develop students’ interdisciplinary teamwork skills, and also challenge students to develop their entrepreneurial skills and engage in entrepreneurial behaviour.
VENTURE CREATION METHODS IN A RESEARCH SETTING (WP2)
The main objective of WP2 is to develop interactive methods for students to develop products for venture creation, e.g. through design thinking or rapid prototyping and solving real problems with business potential, and to encourage students to more quickly test their ideas for commercial activity and potentially become entrepreneurs.
VENTURE CREATION PROGRAMS (WP3)
WP3 will identify, map and describe leading venture creation programs using an action-based approach,i.e. teaching “through” entrepreneurship as opposed to “about” entrepreneurship or “for” entrepreneurship. The mapping of best practices will be related to organization, content, student engagement and output. Even though the focus is on specialized entrepreneurship education and sharing of methods with other programs seeking venture creation as an output, a key issue will be how these programs can contribute to a permanent change of mindset in broader groups of students.
INCREASE STUDENTS’ ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET AND SKILLS IN HIGHER EDUCATION (WP4)
WP4 seek to benefit from the coordination gains from WP1-WP3. WP4 focus on entrepreneurship in different contexts and on finding appropriate approaches for introducing action components in different disciplines and professions that can stimulate students’ entrepreneurial skills and mindsets.
DOCUMENTATION AND DISSEMINATION OF KNOWLEDGE (WP5)
WP5 will orchestrate the resources and projects in Engage and create a common ground by gathering, combining and accumulating knowledge, and identifying the needs for additional knowledge with regard to developing students’ entrepreneurial skills. The main objective of WP5 is therefore to document and evaluate the activities in Engage, but also to assemble the knowledge to create and disseminate a comprehensive knowledgebase regarding entrepreneurship education.
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The Management Group
Roger Sørheim
Center Leader
Frode Halvorsen
Center Coordinator
Ela Sjølie
Leader WP1
Martin Steinert
Leader WP2
Øystein Widding
Leader WP3
Gry Alsos
Leader WP4
Kari Djupdal
Leader WP5
Torgeir Adland
PhD student
Synne M. Sollie
Student
Where you can find us
Do you want to come for a visit? Here are the different places where you can find us.
Sentralbygg II, 5th floor
Institutt for Industriell Økonomi og Teknologiledelse
Bodø Campus
Handelshøyskolen i Bodø
Gamle Fysikk, 3rd floor
Gamle Fysikk, 3rd floor
Verkstedtekniske Laboratorier
Richard Birkelands vei 2B