Education directed to empower master students as change agents engaging in sustainability transitions by initiating transformative and integrative master thesis projects during their final year at university. The students learn transformative backcasting tools to work in complex systems of societal actors from public sector, industry and academia.

Creating transitions in a complex socio-technical system, where universities need to collaborate with the public- and private sector (the triple helix) is often hindered by various kinds of lock-ins.In Sweden, previous attempts to solve this include companies, governmental bodies and researchers acting individually to bring together stakeholders to dislodge these lock-ins. To complement this, a neutral “Challenge Lab” arena was created, where master students run transformative backcasting projects. Research shows that industrial stakeholders claim the students are in a unique position as unthreatening, yet challenging. Academic stakeholders highlight students as unravelling issues and going deeper in the questions resulting in quicker processes and trust in their own dialogue work. Public sector stakeholders claim dialogue resulted in true personal opinions coming to the surface and another stakeholder modified their overall climate strategy as a result of the change agent dialogue. The students in the Challenge Lab following the methods, are unthreatening yet challenging change agents, catalysing trust on various triple helix system levels and related to five regional knowledge clusters; Urban Future, Marine Environment and Maritime Sector, Green Chemistry and Bio-based Products, Sustainable Mobility, and Life Science. The students are - catalysing transformation and integration - backed up by the Chalmers University of Technology matrix organisation “Areas of Advance” entities: Built Environment, Energy, Information and Communication Technology, Life Science Engineering, Materials Science, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Production, and Transport. Currently, the Challenge Lab is built on a preparatory course and a physical arena for master thesis work located at one of the science parks in the city of Gothenburg.

Current lab, now running as a full post-pilot project is being continuously documented for further packaging and transfer to other universities. Researchers are following the work to gain more perspectives for the main faculty in the transferability. The lab has so far engaged students from more than 20 countries and around 19 master programs.

Researchers are following the work and is monitoring the progress.

Chalmers University of Technology