Universidad San Francisco de Quito - USFQ
IN-25: Innovation B

Through the Innovation and Sustainability Office (OIS for its acronym in Spanish), Universidad San Francisco (USFQ) in Ecuador has developed a capstone course called Social and Environmental Project (PISA for its Spanish acronym in 2015). This class has been treated as a prototype and has been redesigned constantly, striving to ultimately achieve a space to generate long-term sustainability impacts within and without the academic community. PISA applies design thinking for social innovation (DTSI) to thrust students to use toolsets and cultivate skills to solve real life social and environmental challenges with deliverables that require the application and deployment of these solutions on the ground. In order to improve design, implementation and evaluation of the efficacy and efficiency of PISA, USFQ created the DLab. This is a laboratory for research and creation of transdisciplinary projects, an experimental space that merges art and science where students, faculty and external stakeholders co create solutions. DLab was created in 2018 with the aim to enhance PISA learning outcomes and generate sustainability projects that integrate academia, research and market niches (in the form of community, institutional and industry engagement) to achieve longer-term undertakings that can allow for impact assessment and monitoring. In the context of South America, transdisciplinary experiential learning spaces like DLab and classes such as PISA are innovating practices in the academic sector, where rigid academic structures that limit inter/multi/and transdisciplinary learning and academics predominate. USFQ`s programs represent an innovation in academics, and sustainability learning.