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Content: The Collaborative Economy connects your creative and critical skills to the world of work. This module builds on the skills you have learned in the first year of study and asks you to apply those skills to issues arising when people work together in organisations. As our work and social systems become more and more complex and intertwined, multi-faceted problems are less likely to be solved by individuals. They are resolved by people working in networked teams, both official and unofficial. Teams are the fundamental driver of organisational development (Senge, 1990).ÌýÌý

To enable groups to bring together critical thought, creative practice, and technical skills to solve complex problems, and to foster the multiplicity of viewpoints required to embrace the diverse context of many issues, teams need to be able to engage in processes that yield transformative learning, and to allow members to reflect on their work together.ÌýÌý

This module introduces some of the knowledge, skills and processes needed to collaborate to articulate issues, formulate solutions, and create content. It’s a practice-based module that requires you to learn and implement several team working methods and processes. These skills will then be applied to addressing a real world problem or question.ÌýÌýÌý

The Collaborative Economy is a foundation for your future activities because it asks you to apply your creative and critical university training beyond the academy. You will reflect on how different factors (including social, cultural and economic) influence outcomes and perspectives in group working and how this can be addressed in the way teams are set up and how they operate. In the context of the workplace of the future, students will learn and practice collaborative processes including Liberating Structures and Open Space Technology. Students will then use these as approaches to their project work throughout the rest of the programme.

Teaching delivery: Lectures, seminars and practical workshops: students will learn several collaborative working techniques. You will then work in teams on a task set by an outside group. You will employ your creative and critical research skills working together to address an issue or problem and then produce a report in response. Teaching will take place throughout term 1 and the first half of term 2. You will then undertake supervised project work for the rest of term 2.

Indicative topics: Non-hierarchical organising. Liberating Structures. Open Space Technology.

Module aims:

• To introduce key theories of enterprise organisation and management based on horizontal structures built on networks and relationships drawn from Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933)ÌýÌý
• To extend students’ knowledge and skills in collaborative working practicesÌýÌý
• To provide students with an opportunity to apply collaborative working practices in peer groups on a real-world project.ÌýÌý
• To provide students with an opportunity to generate a team-written creative response to an issue facing an organisation.

This module is taught on the ÐÂÏã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±½á¹ûEast campus in Stratford.Ìý