Open Innovation Strategies in Engineering Education

Abstract

This article considers two approaches to improving engineering education through open innovation: one focuses on informal educational activities through organizing student competitions and hackathons, and the second focuses on implementing project-based learning in formal education. The main goal is to compare the effectiveness and implementation challenges of the two proposed strategies. Both approaches were implemented at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, for teaching and learning the subjects in IT education, namely blockchain technologies and IoT. The results show that both approaches provide good results and positively affect learning outcomes and students' motivation. We analyze the advantages and challenges of each of them in detail and provide guidelines for their implementation.