Dr Ehsan Khavandkar is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Faculty of Business, Law and Politics. Between February and May 2022 he led a group of Business School students on a student-led knowledge exchange project to tackle some of the pressing regional development issues and talent management challenges. The project was with the EDGE HUB and involved the development of potential tech-forward digital solutions to improve access to talent and workforce connectivity, and promote social mobility at a regional level. The EDGE HUB is a Hull based technology centre, with a focus to connect education to enterprise and harness skills for the future.
The `Engaging with Entrepreneurial Organisations` initiative, which started in 2019, entails a collaborative industry project with a special focus on innovation through design thinking, and this year`s project marked the third year in a row where HUBS students worked with external organisations as part of their `Authentic Business Learning` journey. These projects have helped students to learn a lot about how innovation is being approached by entrepreneurial organisations, and they have had the chance to learn and apply design thinking and innovation principles to real-world industry projects, through empathising with potential users, prototyping and refining their offerings, while receiving tailored coaching and mentoring from both the external organisation`s managers and their lecturer, Ehsan, throughout the project.
Ehsan was delighted at the strong relationships that were built between the KE partner and the students. He feels this enabled the students to develop a range of essential soft skills and unlock a real-time understanding of how to incorporate customers` needs into their design through application of iterative cycles of `empathy-ideation-experimentation-evaluation`. He thinks that the experience of working with, designing for, and presenting to external business people gives a real boost of confidence to the students.
Ehsan feels that one of the biggest challenges we face with knowledge exchange involving students is the language of business, but that is why experience’s such as this project are invaluable for students. They have to learn to understand how to translate what the business needs are and how this develops into the work to meet those real world needs.
In terms of what is next for Ehsan’s knowledge exchange work, he is working on embedding knowledge exchange into the MSc programmes he leads. He feels this has a triple benefit: students learn a lot about how innovation is being approached by entrepreneurial organisations, and businesses get fresh ideas from working from working with students, and we showcase what our students can do and the impact they can have.
Ehsan values his knowledge exchange work as he knows it keeps him up to date with the trends in the industry, and enables him to tailor his research to ensure it has a practical use for businesses and creates “true impact”. He sees knowledge exchange as bridging the gap between the world of businesses and the realm of academic research, and believes that knowledge exchange, and doing impactful research, is his most important role as an academic.
