Artevelde University — When the professors run the sprint first

The gap between teaching innovation and doing it

Most business education teaches innovation as a subject. Students learn frameworks, study cases, understand the theory of how organizations generate new ideas and validate them. The pedagogy is often excellent. The gap is experiential: knowing how a Design Sprint works is different from having run one.

That gap matters more than it might seem. When professors teach from theory alone, students develop theoretical competence — the ability to describe and analyze innovation processes. What they often don't develop is the tolerance for ambiguity, the bias toward action, and the comfort with rapid iteration that actual innovation practice requires. Those capabilities aren't transmitted through lectures. They're built through doing.

Artevelde University of Applied Sciences in Ghent recognized this gap and decided to address it at the source: not by redesigning the curriculum first, but by putting the faculty through the experience themselves.

What Artevelde decided to do differently

In August 2022, Design Sprint Academy ran a two-day Design Sprint Training for academic staff at Artevelde University in Ghent, Belgium. The participants were business management professors and lecturers — people whose professional lives are built around intellectual rigor, theoretical depth, and structured knowledge transfer.

The training put them through the complete Design Sprint process using a real business problem. Not a simulated exercise designed to be solvable within the training parameters. A genuine challenge, worked through with the same structure, time pressure, and decision-making demands that a real sprint requires.

Over two days, participants mapped the challenge, generated ideas individually before sharing them with the group, converged on a direction, built interactive prototypes using Uizard (now part of Miro), and moved toward testing. The progression from abstract problem to working prototype — in two days, by people who hadn't done this before — was the point of the exercise.

What it means for academics to build a prototype

For corporate teams, building a prototype in a Design Sprint is demanding but conceptually familiar. Most product and design professionals have some relationship to the idea of making something rough and putting it in front of users.

For academics, it's a more significant shift. Professors are trained to be precise, thorough, and authoritative — to know things before they say them, and to say them carefully. The Design Sprint asks for something structurally different: build something incomplete, accept that it will be imperfect, and learn from what happens when someone interacts with it.

That shift — from the authority of expertise to the productive uncertainty of a prototype — is not a small one. It requires a different relationship with being wrong, a different tolerance for ambiguity, and a willingness to act before you're certain. These are exactly the capabilities that are hardest to teach in a traditional academic setting, and hardest to transmit to students if you haven't experienced them yourself.

Using Uizard — now part of Miro — a tool that allows non-designers to build interactive prototypes quickly — removed the technical barrier that might otherwise have made the prototyping step feel inaccessible to faculty without design backgrounds. The output wasn't polished. It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be testable, which is a different and more important standard.

The Together Alone principle in an academic room

One of the Design Sprint principles that landed with particular force in the Artevelde session was the "Together Alone" structure: the discipline of generating ideas individually before sharing them with the group.

In academic environments, intellectual debate is a professional norm. Ideas are typically developed through discussion, refined through challenge, and tested through argumentation. The result is that group dynamics heavily influence which ideas surface and which don't — senior voices, confident speakers, and well-established positions tend to shape the direction before quieter participants have had space to contribute.

The Design Sprint's individual-before-group structure directly disrupts that dynamic. Every participant generates their thinking independently first. When ideas are shared, they're shared simultaneously rather than sequentially, which means the first idea doesn't anchor the group's direction. For faculty accustomed to seminar-style discussion, this felt counterintuitive — and produced noticeably different results. Ideas that might not have survived early group scrutiny had the chance to develop before being exposed to it.

This is one of the sprint principles that translates most directly into pedagogical practice. A professor who has experienced the difference between simultaneous individual ideation and sequential group discussion is better equipped to design teaching situations that surface the full range of student thinking.

Why the training starts with faculty, not students

The most significant outcome of the Artevelde engagement isn't what the professors learned in the two days. It's what their students will experience as a result.

When faculty go through Design Sprint Training, they don't just acquire a methodology. They acquire firsthand experience of what it feels like to work under time pressure toward a testable output, to make decisions without complete information, to build something rough and learn from how it performs. That experience changes how they teach — not just what they teach.

A professor who has built a prototype using Uizard in a high-pressure two-day session is not the same teacher they were before. They can speak to the experience from the inside. They understand where the discomfort is, where the breakthroughs tend to happen, and what the process actually demands — not theoretically, but from having done it. That knowledge is transmitted differently in a classroom. It creates a different kind of authority: not the authority of expertise alone, but the authority of shared experience.

The integration of Design Sprints into Artevelde's curriculum means students will encounter structured innovation methodology not as a case study or a framework to memorize, but as a practice their professors have personally navigated. That's a different kind of education — one that prepares students to face complexity with a method, not just with knowledge about methods.

What this means for higher education institutions

The Artevelde case points to something broader than one university's curriculum decision. It surfaces a structural question that most business schools and universities of applied sciences are navigating: how do you teach innovation practice, not just innovation theory?

The answer most institutions reach for is curriculum redesign: add a design thinking module, introduce agile methodologies, create an innovation lab. These investments have value. But they often stop short of the step that makes the difference: ensuring that the people delivering the curriculum have firsthand experience of the practice they're teaching.

Design Sprint Training for faculty is a direct investment in that step. It doesn't require curriculum redesign as a prerequisite. It produces professors who have worked through the full sprint process, who understand the method from the inside, and who can integrate it into their teaching with the kind of credibility that comes from personal experience rather than theoretical familiarity.

For institutions that want their students to graduate with genuine innovation capability — the ability to frame a problem, prototype a solution, and test it with real users — the most direct path is ensuring their faculty have done exactly that themselves.