The influence of the sustainability agenda on learning objectives in innovation courses for engineering students?

Sustainability is an increasingly important topic all over the world and engineers have an important role. This calls for a new generation of innovative engineers who contribute to solutions with sustainability awareness. But how can we educate for this? With this contribution, we wish to contribute to an emerging dialog about how to formulate learning objectives that incorporate sustainability in innovation courses. In theory, sustainability is a capacious term that can be discovered through numerous lenses. In our study we examine how the phenomenon of sustainability is described in theory and in practice. We aim to unfold the multiple dimensions of sustainability rather than identifying the dominant discourse. Our research is based on insights from literature and empirical data from course descriptions that incorporate sustainability in learning objectives for innovation courses in engineering education. Our results show that despite study programs ambition to incorporate sustainability into educations the translation from an overarching ideology into concrete assemble learning objectives is not completed. Learning objectives most often are centered “about” and “for” and only few on “how-to”/ “through” . We also see a focus on management and strategy rather than on finding solutions. Basic knowledge about higher level decision making, stategizing and business modeling in organisations is relevant, however the ability to create new solutions, i.e. entreprepreneurial competences, is paramount.