Minor Bio-inspired innovation and sustainability

Bio-inspired @UGent

Mission

This program aims to train students in learning how to valorise biological knowledge and skills, in their broadest sense. The focus is to learn how to use and translate that knowledge and those skills to engage into multidisciplinary collaboration, in order to tackle challenges that our society is confronted with. Challenges can be as broad as climate change, biodiversity loss, issues of sustainability. Challenges can also be within a narrower scope in the field of technological innovation, medical applications, durable material use, etc.

Why bio-inspiration?

Here you can find some inspiring talks about the potential of bio-inspired innovation:

Program

The program comprises training in three main fields: (1) entrepreneurship, (2) bio-inspired design thinking, and (3) interdisciplinarity. These fields are organised in compulsory courses, a project course and elective courses:

  • compulsory courses: Basic entrepreneurship, Dare to venture
  • project course: Bio-inspired project
  • elective courses: a selection of courses provided by the Faculty of Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering. Examples of these courses can be found here.

More info on the mission and program can be found here.

Student projects

Students working on mycelium project

In the Bio-inspired project course, students work as a team and go through the whole process of bio-inspired design thinking. The course involves several workshops (on design thinking, user-centred design, prototyping, ...), brainstorm sessions, pitch presentations, reporting, and autonomous act

ivities. Students go through every step in the process, starting from identifying a challenge, refining possible challenges, abstraction of biological solutions to realistic solutions to the challenge, getting into contact with experts in other fields, etc.

Here you can find a blog on the projects of students of previous years:

Testimonials

Here some testimonials of students who took up the minor before.