News & Events
News & Events
News & Events

Students exploring co-creation

As part of the Open Space Studio Journey for the InnoEnergy Master Programme ENTECH, all ENTECH students get to experience two sessions of so-called Winter Ateliers during their programme. The Winter Atelier is a week filled with learning, exploring, networking and co-creating – in 2017 it took place at the end of October in Herbstein, Germany.

The Open Space Studio (OSS) Journey for ENTECH is a complementary 24 month training for our MSc ENTECH students, which focuses on three main areas: personal development; development of social skills and team-building; and co-creation. Part of this training was the Winter Atelier, where students from the new 2017 intake met up with students from the 2016 intake for a whole week of intense connecting and learning and, of course, fun.

The Winter Atelier 2017 took place in Herbstein Germany, a small village surrounded by rolling hills and at that time of the year colourful, forests. The session covered a wide range of topics for both groups of students, those who have started in 2016 and those who recently joined the Master’s School.

The new students learned about intercultural competence, differences and perceptions, as well as how to foster network capabilities within complex intercultural teams.

The 2016 students started by taking their knowledge and skills to a higher level to foster truly efficient and co-creative environments within teams, by learning about what it really means to be a facilitator of co-creation, a so-called ‘catalyst’ and how to create the right context that allows personal and social growth. This then progressed into preparing for the next big step in their life – interviews for Master Theses and jobs – by learning and practicing how to express their vision, qualities and passions in a clear and engaging way, especially in front of big audiences. In addition, throughout the week they were given the opportunity to design and develop a potential additional training module for their own OSS Journey, for the coming year. By using the methods of co-creation, catalysing what they had been learning and using during previous OSS events, they organised an effective workflow for their project and achieved a detailed end result that the complete intake not only agreed on, but which they are genuinely excited to bring to fruition. This was then presented, along with their methodology and approach to the task, to the new intake at the end of the Winter Atelier.

The last two days of the Winter Atelier brought both intakes together to learn and explore the meaning of perception through different theoretical models and practices, focusing on the disparities between speaker and listener, and the natural relation of each person to different values and behaviours.

The schedule was accompanied by fun activities like an evening hike, karaoke night and a (now legendary) Halloween Party, which included a costume contest.

You can find pictures in our Flickr album.