Transferring an Interdisciplinary Student Product Development Project to Full Online Conduction

“Product Innovation” is a 7-month product development course, conducted at the Institute of Innovation and Industrial Management with international and interdisciplinary student teams. A close connection and interaction between industry, students and research has been an important part of this project-based learning course. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the worldwide occurring lockdowns, students were not able anymore to interact and conduct their projects in the proven manner. Being in a critical phase of the project, the course concept had to be reorganized and transferred to online conduction by using computer supported collaboration work within a few days. Both observations and surveys were used to compare changes in student´s behaviour and results of the project. This paper will describe 1) the original situation and course concept, 2) show how the course was transformed to online conduction, 3) describe the observations made and 4) analyse how the students experienced the transformation.