A Creativity and Innovation Course for Engineers

In this chapter, the teaching methodologies and pedagogical styles adopted within the “Creativity and Innovation”, offered at the University of Bologna in Italy are described. The main goal of the course is to give students both a theoretical foundation and a hands-on experience about meta-cognitive strategies for the control of the creative thinking process. The students were engaged in the selection of a focus area within the range promoted by a call for new start-ups, creating the playground for team-oriented sessions in which relevant information was collected, divergent modifiers were applied, ideas were generated, business models were sketched and assessed, and finally concluding the course with a team presentation of the generated ideas. The feedback received from the engineering students was very positive. While the ideational part of the class followed a learning-by-doing approach, this was preceded by a specific theoretical part, striking an effective balance between theory and practice.