Into the new — and how we did the first-ever class in Carcavelos
There’s a new school on the horizon and bouncing off the fresh paint on the walls is a mantra of exploration, purpose, discovery, invention, values, innovation, people, technology and future. These are the core values I signed up for when I joined Nova SBE and saw materialize when I started meeting the community of faculty, staff, and students.
While most of what I’ve been working on as Head of the Center for Digital Business and Technology is still under wraps, some things I can write about, and one of the most exciting ones to write about is the community of students or at least the small sample I got to experience in my classes, and what this new campus means to them. I was invited to teach Product Design and Development twice and decided early on to challenge both sets of students to use the class space as a place for them to safely experiment hands-on in their own creative and development efforts. Pure learning by doing.
While I plan to have different challenges each time I teach the class, this past spring the theme was just inescapable in the school’s life for me to consider anything else:
Design (a product or service) for the community of the new campus of Carcavelos
The ambition for the campus is big and everyone has been invited to be part of it. So we set the students free, as in “allowed to”, after the first class, which was about how they, even in a tiny bit, could design, create, and build for the new, upcoming, campus.
Get Inside The Building
With some theories and examples, they started to quickly grasp the concepts. These students are sharp. We talked about who can design, what the process is, what steps should be considered, mostly through classroom discussions. And we then let them run group brainstorms to generate some ideas, and they did, but nothing beats getting outside the building for inspiration. Or, in this case, get inside the (new) building.
We took a bus to Carcavelos and let the students explore the construction site and see what the space looked like. With Pedro Santa-Clara as a host, these were probably the first ever Nova SBE lectures given in Carcavelos, still under construction.
As work progressed students were tasked with annotating their ideas and by the end books were filled with almost 250 valid ideas in total. At the end of the course, teams had researched, selected, designed, prototyped and presented one of their ideas for feedback. I had fun in the process and was very happy with the outcome and also from all that I learned with them.
The last exercise I asked them to do is reflect on their experience with the process of creating and designing something new. Students are also free to present in whatever medium they think works best and a board-game depicting the major steps and actions was just one of the examples:
As I write this, the new term, the first one in Carcavelos, is about to start. I’m teaching this class again and there will be a new challenge for students and their teams. They’ll explore, imagine, create, and build. We’re putting together the tools for even bigger ambitions and I hope to come back to this space to let you know how happy the students were. ;)
And, it will always be about going into the new.
Professor João Castro concluded his Ph.D. in Engineering Systems at MIT focusing on Product Development methods and how people can efficiently and effectively build large and complex products by coordinating the inputs of multi-disciplinary. For six years, Professor João Castro managed a disruptive innovation initiative for Sumol+Compal, launching new business opportunities, promoting innovation culture, and measuring innovation outputs of the whole company. Currently, he serves as a non-executive board member of Impresa, one of the most prestigious media groups in Portugal, he is a seed capital investor at Ganexa Capital, and Head of Center for Digital Business at Nova School of Business & Economics.
