Food Innovation Lab goes digital

20 students. 12 experts. 8 weeks. 5 ideas. 2 lecturers. And just one solution: digitalization.

When we collected the post-its from our last lecture at the Student Project House before switching to the digital space due to Covid-19, we felt uncertain about how a lecture with focus on teamwork, prototyping and testing would work in the digital space. Little did we know that a few weeks down the line, our students would have transformed their kitchens at home into prototyping spaces. They are more than happy that they can finally use as many (digital) post-its as they want whilst not wasting paper; and instead of talking to users in person, they have picked up their phones to call them or conduct surveys. We - this is Lucie and Judith - recently finished our PhDs in Food Process Engineering and felt the big wish to enrich the Food Science curriculum with a lecture on the topic of innovation. Our lecture, called the Food Innovation Lab, aims at guiding student teams through an innovation process where they learn to develop their own ideas to tackle the global challenges of our food system. It is supported by Innovedum, a fund for innovative teaching formats set up by Rector Prof. Dr. Sarah Springman (if you ever feel like implementing a novel lecture, you may submit your proposal on September and March 1st of any given year).