SEED Guide

1.2. SEED Sustainability Challenges

To use the 12 SEED Sustainability Challenges in your course, we offer the following notes:

• Select from the sustainability challenges to build a course or course module tailored to your students’ needs. For example, students can work on just one Sustainability Challenge throughout the course or be introduced to up to 12 Sustainability Challenges from this list:

• Discover whether your students have experience working with sustainability, entrepreneurship, and/or design thinking through an initial needs analysis. Since the launch of Stanford University’s d.school in 2008 and the European-wide work of the Erasmus⁺ DT.Uni project, more students have at least heard of design thinking but may not have yet had the chance to actually work with it hands on. Their level of familiarity with these topics will help you make choices as you build your materials.
• Use the SEED Sustainability Challenges sequentially or build your own course by choosing the levels, experience with business, and topics according to the needs analysis of the students in a specific course.
• Ensure that students develop critical and entrepreneurial thinking in response to sustainability challenges. The Novice (🟊) and Beginner (🟊🟊) levels of the SEED Sustainability Challenges are appropriate for improving existing businesses or to pursue an innovative product or service within a company (intrapreneurship) while the Intermediate (🟊🟊🟊) and Advanced (🟊🟊🟊🟊) levels target new businesses or develop a concept for a new business (entrepreneurship).
• If you do not have the freedom or flexibility to use the full SEED course, begin with just one module. The positive experience will be enough to encourage you to add still more.

The 12 SEED Sustainability Challenges and the accompanying design thinking tools, tasks, and steps have been piloted with nearly 100 students in eight different courses of Applied English at the Guarda Polytechnic University (IPG) School of Technology and Management. For these piloting activities, teachers, administrators, researchers, members of the local community, 2-year specialization students, BSc students, and MSc students collaborated in design thinking workshops in co-creation with glocal (global and local) stakeholders in the two semesters of the academic year 2023-2024. In the period just before publication, in May 2024, the material was fine-tuned with a final piloting activity, co-funded by the SEED Erasmus+ project, led by IPG at Reykjavik University’s Center for Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (RUCRIE), Iceland.

Note specifically the following encouraging notes from the piloting and follow-up focus group discussions:

• Students in our piloting processes were engaged, citing teamwork, holistic learning and growing self-awareness as well as confidence-building in autonomous acquisition of knowledge and vocabulary as specific added value.
• The autonomy other participants pointed to also involved growing interdependence that allowed them to trust their teammates, which was pointed out as an inspiring way to work together, where judgment is reserved, errors are not an embarrassment but embraced as opportunities for improvement, and collaboration is favored.
• Left to work individually for a week-long assignment on the SEED Sustainability Challenges, the overwhelming majority of the focus groups of students admitted to having consulted AI as an imaginary teammate instead of working in isolation. These AI-queries, for example, involved simulating alternately a fountain of unfiltered ideas or a devil’s advocate position according to the instructions initially provided by each student.
• Despite the convenience of leveraging AI on their own time, the students overwhelmingly preferred the work done with in-person teams, where they could read body language and communicate more freely. They also remembered the work they had done much more effectively when working on a team.