05/21/2023
Professors Luiz Fernando Durão (left) and André Santana, from the Engineering courses, highlight the importance of plurality to foster innovation
Bárbara Nór
It is not possible to innovate without diversity. This is the perception that Insper Engineering professors Luiz Fernando Durão and André Santana have been having increasingly clear. If the courses in the design, technology and entrepreneurship tracks have always been guided by social issues, addressing themes such as food insecurity, Brazilian education and the students’ own intention to identify problems in their social contexts, in recent years Durão and Santana say they wanted to go even further.
On the one hand, society and the market increasingly expect professionals who are better prepared to deal with diverse environments. On the other, innovation itself requires a more plural and diverse performance. “To develop skills related to innovation and, in fact, solve real-world problems, designers need to really connect with the context of the problems they are solving. That’s why it is fundamental that solutions are developed by teams with diverse outlooks,” says André Santana. “When we structure teams with distinct repertoires, it is possible to identify non-obvious paths and, therefore, employ innovation in a more sustainable way, aiming to find solutions that are truly desirable for those who experience the problem.”
At the same time, the concern is to ensure that the projects speak to students coming from different realities. “We want students from different regions to represent their agendas, communities, and contexts, to have a voice, and to be able to identify with the projects they develop,” says Santana. “Our goal is that they have contact with cases and scenarios where they see themselves represented as part of the process, that they see innovation in a way connected to the reality where they came from.”
For Santana, it is important to question the idea that innovation would be reserved only for expensive technologies and accessible only to a part of society. “Creating a solution to attack a public transportation problem, for example, is super-relevant. However, for these problems to be solved, it is important that people who experience the problems are part of building the solution,” says Santana. “But many students end up having a hard time seeing innovation in projects from their everyday lives.”
In this process, the interaction with Insper’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee has been essential, according to the professors. “We understand that design is an applied social science, so it is vital to have this support to bring more elements of our society into the applications we develop,” says Luiz Durão. “The committee has helped us bring different people to speak and made us rethink the bibliography, bringing suggestions of new authors.”
As a result, one of the ongoing measures is the revision of the course’s own menu. “We are studying the authors and analyzing how to include more black and female authors,” says Durão. “These authors deal with the same theories, but they bring this look of the bias in innovation and product design, which are aspects we want to bring more into the discussion.”
Another new feature has been to increasingly diversify the professionals invited to speak to the classes at Insper. The goal is to invite more women, more black people, LGBTQIAPN+ and people from different regions to tell their experiences with innovation and with the solution of problems they have experienced.
And, of course, the idea is to increasingly expose the students themselves to the differences between them. To this end, the teams formed among the students in the course are also increasingly mixed. “We want to prepare the student to deal with these elements of diversity and understand that this should be the standard, that this should be the natural thing,” says Durão. This would not only help ensure that the innovations found are relevant, but would also make professionals more qualified for the market. “The role of the university is also to train leaders who take this into consideration and understand their responsibility in the change,” he says.
