Courses at Challenge Lab

Autumn Term: Leadership for Sustainability Transitions – SEE040 (previously SEE025 and ENM145)

Apply to the Challenge Lab course “SEE040 – Leadership for Sustainability Transitions”! The course is available in the student portal here.

This course is one of the most inspiring courses I have taken at Chalmers. We start by figuring out what is important for humanity. Then we identify the problems. Instead of getting a predefinied question, we define the question on our own and then try to find solutions.

Erik Wallnér, master’s student in Sustainable Energy Systems

The course has been highly appreciated by our students since its start in 2014. The aim of the course is to provide theoretical perspectives, methods and tools for leading sustainability-driven innovation in society. The leadership builds on backcasting as an over-arching approach, where you develop a leadership on three levels: leading yourself, leading together with others, and leading for humanity. This leadership is introduced through literature and lectures, is applied in a real-world case “a Good Life on Campus”, and is developed through individual exercises and reflection. Based on this foundation, you will in your future career be able to lead complex transitional processes involving stakeholders from different societal sectors. Some of the students attending the course choose to deepen their leadership capabilities further by conducting their master thesis at the Challenge Lab during the spring.

The course is open to students from all master programs. Ask your master program director if you have any questions of how it relates to your program. And if you have any questions about the course, and the Challenge Lab master thesis lab, don’t hesitate to contact us: challengelab@chalmers.se.

This course is very different because it is intellectually stimulating rather than technically challenged. It has been the first time at Chalmers that I have fundamentally questioned who I am, why I do things and how I can contribute to sustainable change in the world.

Comment from the course evaluation survey 2017

Autumn Term: System Interventions for Sustainability Transitions – SEE050

Students attending SEE040 course also choose to deepen their leadership capabilities further by taking the SEE050 – “System Interventions for Sustainability Transitions”, which in turn prepares for a thesis in line with Challenge Lab. SEE50, however, has been paused for the 2021/2022 academic year and will return in 2022/2023. The course is available in the student portal here.