This Research Full Paper explores different implementations of and teachers’ experiences from challenge-driven education and similar learning approaches in engineering education and other higher education contexts. Through an action research approach key concerns among the teachers and similarities and differences between the studied courses can be identified. The study highlights the potential in these learning approaches, as means for breaking and going beyond the traditional boundaries of higher education, enhancing and cross-fertilizing engineering education with other disciplines, and empowering students both as professionals and humans. It also indicates potential barriers and in-built tensions that are crucial to handle for successful implementation. The study further shows on great opportunities for mutual learning and collaboration between teachers from diverse contexts and backgrounds. The findings are discussed in relation to research within domains such as sustainability education, transformative learning, and futures studies, and opportunities for further research and development are outlined.

One of the barriers for companies to implement circular economy (CE) principles is creating a portfolio of CE projects. Circularity indicators can evaluate circularity for managing products in circularity perspective. However, existing circularity indicators are either lacking a holistic facet of CE or too complicated for practical usage, which could be barriers for practitioners to manage a CE project portfolio. The aim of this study is to develop a highly intelligible CE portfolio management tool to visualize circularity calculated by circularity indicators with holistic criteria. The CE portfolio mapping tool was built through semi-structured interviews with a case company, identifying three main requirements for general CE portfolio management tools and revealing four contributions of the developed tool. This study contributes to integrating practitioner view into the research context of circularity indicators and taking first step toward further research in CE portfolio management.

Sustainable development requires disruptive changes and radical innovations, and the capability to deliver this in relation to adapt to a sustainable development is needed in mature large industrial companies. Integration between sustainability and business development is needed, which the Circular Economy model offers. Circular Economy is little implemented in practice, and in the present paper barriers to a transition to Circular Economy is identified. Barriers are financial, structural, operational, attitudinal and technological. They are also, as analyzed in relation to innovation management, characterized by a need to increase integration between a number of different perspectives and domains in industry.

The importance of user involvement has long been stressed in the innovation management literature. However, we argue that this literature does not take sufficient account to the employment and incorporation of users in innovation. Hence, we explore the role of incorporated users in innovation activities. The research was conducted in a business unit in a large medical technology company with long experience of employing and incorporating physicians and nurses in its new product development activities. Data were collected through a questionnaire and interviews with key individuals. The study reveals that the incorporation of users has an overall positive effect on innovation activities, but that this way of working also raises several managerial issues. The results show that incorporated users play several different roles in the unit as user representatives, networkers, idea promoters and change agents. Based on our findings we propose managerial implications related to the incorporation of users.

The objective of this article is to uncover benefits and risks of Integrated Product Service Offering (IPSO) in a systematic manner. To do so, it adopts an explorative longitudinal in-depth case study (development of an IPSO based on a new technology) and adds insights to the existing literature. The article first proposes a theoretical and generic framework termed the PCP (Provider - Customer - Product) triangle with associated information flow and uncertainty. Second, various types of benefits and risks are presented based on the framework. Among others, the benefit of keeping IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) with the provider and the risk of regulation change are new findings from the case study. In addition, the case study reveals that IPSO is regarded as a positive contributor to innovation. Applying the framework and classification of benefits and risks as norms to other cases has yet to be done for verification. However, the framework contributes scientifically to a better understanding of the benefits and risks of IPSO. In addition, this framework is advantageous with its easiness to understand, which contributes practically to the dissemination of IPSO insight to industry.