Fundamental innovations devised by universities and research institutes have changed the world – particularly so when collaboration between different fields was involved. Innovation needs collaboration and interdisciplinary research and work – which despite their benefits is challenging. Particularly, in academia, we are faced with an incentive system that rewards in-depth singularly focused research and discourage people from leaving their knowledge silos. In consequence, we have established cooperation between the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Vienna University of Economics and Business (Albrecht Karlusch, Wolfgang Sachsenhofer) to help foster innovation in one crucial area – and incubate sustainable energy (clean tech) start-up companies. Sixteen students (10 male, 5 female) from Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Italy, and Poland from the disciplines of industrial design, social design, arts as urban innovation, art and knowledge transfer, international management, strategy, innovation, and management control and Erasmus incoming students from the business fields participated in this seminar. This project describes methods (Applied Design Thinking Methods (see Figs. 73, 97), combined with CANVAS (see Fig. 96)) of collaboration of students from the departments of strategic management and entrepreneurship with students of diverse departments of the University of Arts and Design. As fundamental benefit for arts and design students, we observe faster and more immediate success in the implementation and consequently application of ideas in cooperation with entrepreneurship students. In particular, this approach could be valid for students of arts and design education. This project does not only outline the progress of an ongoing project but also focuses on the development of teams and the topic and argues for the need for students to gain insights into applied work in their working context.

Today’s understanding of the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth was greatly shaped by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. He described why innovation is the key element for growth in modern economies (Schumpeter 1934). Innovation needs teams (Kelley and Littmann 2001, 121) that are constituted at the interface of disciplines and between research and practice, as some of the most interesting research is happening there – and even beyond discipline and subject boundaries (Newbury 2011, 381–382).

Despite that, the majority of university seminars remains organized in monodisciplinary silos, meaning attended only by students of one certain (sub-) specialization. Even when the rare seminar encourages students to work collaboratively across disciplines, usually, the setup does not incentivize students to work across specializations. Students therefore are trained to think and work monodisciplinarily and search for solutions mainly within their specialization. Critical abilities such as developing cross-specialized languages, trust, relationships, and norms are little emphasized and usually shrivel (Nahapiet 1998, Bourdieu 1983). Consequently, people who have not learned to work interdisciplinary will have difficulties reaping the outsized benefits of collaboration across disciplines – as students but also as teachers, artists, employees, or entrepreneurs.

As previous research shows difficulties working in interdisciplinary teams (on students’, lecturers’, and organizational level; Donelle Ruwe and James Leve 2001), we like to understand how to make it work. Therefore, we posed the question, how seminars can be designed and implemented to increase benefits from interdisciplinarity learning and enhance students’ skills in working in different disciplines.

Accordingly, we conducted a case study, for which we have set up an interdisciplinary course with students from a business university and an arts and design university. The culture, norms, values, and language between those two universities highly differ, giving us an excellent opportunity to investigate interdisciplinary learning. The start-up-pitch winning group of this seminar was invited to a start-up presentation (Enpact#15) in Germany. Sarah Z Tang, Johannes Simons, and Philip Mattha collaborated on a so called sea sampler (see Fig. 97). Their vision was to create a worldwide on demand service for sea sampling by connecting sailors, who have own boats and have idle time to ocean researchers who are restricted by time, geographic location, and resources. The team consisted of students from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and University of Economics and Business Vienna and marine biologists. This approach nurtured impressive results, including strategic partnerships, an expedition in the Mergui Archipelago and winning a number of pitches and investments.