AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO INTERDISCIPLINARY EDUCATION THROUGH DOMAIN SECTOR COURSES

This paper outlines a framework for interdisciplinary education through domain Sector Courses. The respective set of industrial Sector Courses is conducted at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech). The proposed framework is based on a holistic approach to an industrial sector, considering it with multiple lenses, including technology, business and policy, which provide an interdisciplinary content fundamental to the teaching of innovation. The core idea of a Sector Course is to build a holistic knowledge about a given economic sector and its main actors. In this paper we discuss three examples of the courses offered at Skoltech: a Space Sector Course (Menshenin et al., 2020), a Power Markets Course and a Product Development and Manufacturing Course. All of these courses are called “Sector Courses” taught for graduate-level students and are built upon the CDIO framework (Crawley et al., 2014; Crawley et al., 2013), integrating its standards to support students’ knowledge and skills. We discuss the general approach to building the Syllabus and learning environment in these courses and how these are realized through the CDIO framework. We also describe what elements of the courses are essential and how – when combined together – they lead to the specific set of learning outcomes of such courses. The practical utility of the proposed paper is that it outlines the core principles of the economic sector courses based on the CDIO approach. Such principles allow the systems educators to build a Sector Course in any domain of interest, facilitating the students’ knowledge and skills development to foster innovation.