International Innovation Camps for Tackling Grand Challenges

Addressing Grand Challenges requires innovative pedagogical approaches that equip future leaders with the skills to navigate complex, systemic, and dynamic global issues. This article presents international innovation camps as an instructional innovation for preparing business students to address Grand Challenges. We present insights from two three-week international innovation camps held in 2023 and 2024, a collaboration between business schools in Finland and Mexico focused on the pressing issue of overweight and obese populations—a systemic and structural problem that links individual-, organizational-, and societal-level challenges. These camps aim to develop in students the competencies and mindsets required to address this particular Grand Challenge, namely: (1) critically analyzing dominant problem framings, (2) navigating governance structures to identify collaborative opportunities, (3) engaging in iterative problem-solving through design thinking, and (4) developing systemic, context-sensitive solutions. To achieve these pedagogical objectives, the camps immersed students in real-world problem-solving environments grounded in an experiential learning framework that emphasizes cross-contextual immersion, multivocal stakeholder engagement, and intercultural collaboration to develop innovations tackling the Grand Challenge of mitigating the individual, social, and economic impacts of being overweight or obese.