Designing Experiential Training In Lean Product Development: A Collaboration Between Industry & Academia

This paper presents how collaboration between academics and industry initiated in the context of a local innovation consortium led to the design of a training programme in lean development. The approach inspired from design thinking principles was developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in R&D efficiency and agile project management, pedagogical advisors, specialists in serious game design and project management from academia, lean experts and engineers from the company. Intense collaboration, experience-based inspiration, rapid prototyping including engineers from the company, observers from university, quick learning loops and feedback, contributed to the development of this training programme. This collaboration favoured discussion in terms of expectations from the company and setting up the foundation of the training programme including the constraints of deploying the course for up to 2000+ targeted people worldwide. Experiential learning through serious games and case studies is the pedagogical foundation of the teaching material. The paper discusses the training design process, hypothesis and objectives. All stakeholders learnt from this design thinking approach, leading to innovative training co-creation and demonstrating the richness of interdisciplinary teamwork and relevance of a user-centred approach for lifelong learning training design.