Business students challenging the web with Drupal
Business students challenging the web with Drupal
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During this presentation the concrete projects get elaborated to see how the prototype leads to an interesting medium for researching strategic innovation management. From this experience we suggest a collaboration between academic business education and the Drupal business-ecosystem to work out a Drupal labs initiative.
In a 52 hours course, first year Master students of Business and Technology at the “Vrije Universiteit Brussel” learned how to use Drupal as mashup machine by integrating other API's, particularly Google labs API's. The course had two years of try out and has now just finished its fourth year.
Each year the boundary is being pushed. Last year the good projects got sold, but the best projects are very creative. They can be seen as are prototypes and could lead to spin-offs if nurture properly. This year more prototypes were created and this led to interesting discussions on business opportunities by being creative with Drupal. We plan to expand the course to have second year Master students work more on the business side of their prototypes and maybe get to actual spin-offs.
The course fits a trend to bridge the gap between open sources and open innovation. The course is therefore used as an action-research experiment to work on systematic innovation. What is practical emerging on the web and what is emerging in the academic literature can be reinforce by our own action-research experiment to workout a Drupal labs initiative. This is will be open to discussion.