Impact?! Who says we are waiting for that?
Within our programmes, we often check the relevance of our education by discussing the curriculum and profile with a professional advisory board. The frame of reference is always “the profession,” and the professional partner is usually the expert who, from practice, knows and shares what is needed to perform this profession well in today’s context. This makes sense, as vocational education is designed for this purpose.
The vision on innovation and the future usually comes from academia and finds its way into professional practice.
Increasingly, however, practice itself has become the source of innovation. The profession is no longer a fixed reality to be followed; instead, within the profession, professionals (students, lecturers, and practice partners) contribute to solving problems in the field and work on innovations. In doing so, professionals from different occupations and perspectives join forces.
To ensure that we are addressing the right problems, focusing on the most relevant themes, and mapping whether we are truly collaborating between education, research, and practice, we established the Impact Council.
On July 9, 2025, the Impact Council came together to evaluate the semester 6 programmes, with a focus on interdisciplinary education. We did not do this with a checklist, but by bringing stakeholders together who face the same complex challenges and brainstorming collectively to find solutions.
For each theme, partners such as CGI, Rijkswaterstaat, startups, and alumni of our programmes reviewed the results.
The take-aways?
During the session, it became clear that collaboration between stakeholders with different perspectives and nuances can be a major challenge. Recognising these perspectives (on the student side) and facilitating this process (on the lecturer side) so that it leads to solid analysis combined with a (successful) “courageous” conversation with a partner can already have a huge impact.
One of the assignments involved a request from a children’s hospital department, where a new planning system had to provide a solution for many different stakeholders. The politics of a large organisation, however, ensured that each discipline maintained its own version of the truth.
At almost every table, the wish was expressed to involve more disciplines in the issue. It was also noted that there was a lack of professional products that could genuinely demonstrate the innovative nature of the results. As such, final products mainly proved their value within their own profession, and there was too much emphasis on skills alone, which meant that concrete evidence or collective learning points were still missing.
The substantive lessons learned will be incorporated into the refinement of the RBS Impact Agenda, and the educational lessons learned will be integrated into the design of the new programmes.
Our board members Hanneke Reuling and Erik Boels were also present at the Impact Council. Hanneke praised the council, expressing how impressed she was by the engaged students, programmes, partners, researchers, and lecturers who shared their vision on entrepreneurship, their vulnerability, and above all their ownership within mission-driven education and research.
There was also recognition for the pioneering work done by the RBS programmes, and a recommendation was made to further strengthen connections with other domains of the HR (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences). This will increase the value of this education even more!