The Bachelor in Transformational Leadership and Social Impact (BITLASI) focuses on learning by solving real-world challenges and doing projects related to the UN SDGs. These projects will be the center of students' education and will grow and become more complex as the courses progress. Each year, students will carry out differents projects that will immerse them into the world of impact-driven entrepreneurship resulting in a portfolio of project achievements rather than a new line on their CV.
Since I started to collaborate on this project in 2019, my role has changed over time. It can be summarised in three main missions described below.
September 2021-Now: Prototype an Impact Technology (PIT) academic coordination
Tapping in my previous Fab lab experience, I took the coordination of PIT course, which aims to teach students how to creatively & collaboratively solve a human-centered problem, using both Design Thinking principles and Digital Fabrication technologies.
Learn problem-solving and Design Thinking skills by:
Learn digital fabrication skills and tools to rapidly prototype a Impact Tech using:
Develop collaboration and communication skills by:
The expected outcome of this course is to prototype a funcional product (including hardware and electronics) that solve the given challenge.
September 2020-September 2021: Design the "Learn to Innovate" pillar (30% of entire Curriculum)
During this period, I was in charge of developing the "Learn to Innovate" pillar of BITLASI program in collaboration with the multi-faculty team of esade. This pillar represents the project-based learning part of the program, where students learn about business and gain experience by carrying out real-world projects with social impact in different environments, including esade's campus and innovation hubs in Barcelona, Berlin and Shanghai.
Each year, the "Learn to Innovate" pillar offers three project-based courses (from 3 ECTS to 8 ECTS credits each). Each project is based on a specific UN Social Development Goal (SDG) so that students have the opportunity to apply the business knowledge they’ve learned to the challenges of the 21st century.
Year 1: It's all about PROTOTYPING
Year 2: It's all about SOLVING
Year 3: It's all about DISRUPTING
More information about each project-based course syllabus could be found here
January 2019 - September 2020: Starting from scratch to the first draft of Bitlasi program
During this first phase, I was collaborating with the innovation consulting firm Ideas4Change to draft the first proposal of Bitlasi program. To do so, I followed an in-house methodology called "Pentagrowth" that consits of the following steps:
Step 1 translated in a 6 months research across four areas:
> This step helped us conclude on the importance of an experiencial educational approach (Head/Heart/Hand approach) where students are exposed on cognitive skills&competencies development (Head), emotional skills&competencies development (Heart), action skills&competencies development (Heart)
Step 2 :
Step 3 lead to identify Minerva University as strategic partner for the "Learn how to learn" pilar (=Head)
Step 4
At that time, I was working for the innovation consulting firm "Ideas4Change" in charge of the research that was