4TU.Responsible Sustainability Challenge (2022-2025)
Within the 4TU.RSC track, three cohorts of students from Delft and Eindhoven Universities of Technology and the University of Twente worked together on a real-life challenge regarding sustainability. After matching with a case, they worked as a team to investigate and address an issue regarding sustainability at an external organisation. They provided an unbiased, professional, and academic look into the broad issue that the organisation provided and determined the underlying problems to address. They also shaped their own learning path and team contribution through an expert network and micro-courses. The challenge improved their professional capabilities and helped to make a difference both for personal growth as well as within organisations.
The 4TU.RSC honours programme, which ran from September 2022 to June 2025, is an excellent example of a programme that was both challenging and rewarding. Despite all the obstacles and complexities, the programme will have a lasting impact.
The 4TU.Responsible Sustainability Challenge was an initiative of the 4TU.Centres High-Tech Materials, Energy and Ethics & Technology, a 15 ECTS multidisciplinary and inter-university track for talented and motivated Master Honours students.
During the track, students were provided with online guidance and live events, and students worked on real-life challenges from the industry. This was also a Challenge-Based Learning track, students learned the hard skills and also the soft skills.
Topics for the challenges and learning materials were related to Energy, Sustainability, High-Tech Materials, Ethics.
This challenge started as a pilot in November 2022 and has come to an end in June 2025. For extra info, please visit here.
For detailed information per track per year:
- 4TU.Responsible Sustainability Challenge (2022-2023)
- 4TU.Responsible Sustainability Challenge (2023-2024)
- 4TU.Responsible Sustainability Challenge (2024-2025)
Challenges in Track 2023-2024:
- Solar irrigation systems from Heliostrome
- Waste-to-Energy Conversion from Twence
- Energy Access in Guatemala from Quantum Energy & Engineering
Specific information from each university
University of Twente:
Website: UTwente Honours Programme
Eindhoven University of Technology:
Website: Professional development component of the Honors Master Program.
and TU/e Honors Academy
Delft University of Technology: TU Delft Honours Programme Master
Highlights of the course:
- This project aimed to approach the development and implementation of sustainable technology in a multidisciplinary manner, with an emphasis on energy, materials, and ethics.
- Each group (multidisciplinary, 5-8 students) chose a topic that is related to developments in technology aiming at increasing sustainability in society; topics in this project related to the Green Deal of the European Union.
- Leadership skills: students formulated their own challenges and looked for their own experts.
- External stakeholders adjusted the challenge to a real-life case, ensuring relevance to the here-and-now, non-academic context.
- Academic experts safeguarded the quality, scope, and feasibility.
Course Motivation
From a student’s perspective, this module filled a current need for a practically oriented educational programme that highlights multidisciplinary collaboration. In particular, excellent Master (Honours) students wanted to improve their leadership/teamworking skills and gained real-life project-based experience in a structured and guided way. This module allowed students to step outside their own university and study fields and to put theoretical knowledge into practice. The course was built on the challenge-based learning principles and asked students to drive their own education to gain the knowledge and skills that fit with their individual needs. The module focused on the topic of sustainability, which is a topic that unites students from all different backgrounds and which sparked tremendous enthusiasm within the student community. The module also brought together staff, student assistants and experts from the four technical universities to increase further collaboration and knowledge-sharing.
Core Elements
Within the 4TU.RSC track, the focus was on providing students with a structured approach to implement or improve sustainability efforts within organizations. Students worked together with their peers from the other participating universities (Twente, Delft, and Eindhoven) in multidisciplinary groups. The challenge consisted of the following core elements.
- The central challenge was to implement or improve sustainability at a company/organization. Within this challenge, students worked within a multidisciplinary team of 5-8 students to understand the underlying principles and issues at hand and to formulate an appropriate response that addresses these points. This challenge followed the Challenge-Based Learning methodology, which provides students with a structured but free approach to learning by gaining real-life experience.
- Additional workshops were provided to help structure the challenge and to provide key insights into relevant project management techniques and sustainability efforts that broaden the students' view and help determine creative and motivated methods to address the key issues of the challenge. These workshops also included a match-making event (in which both students and the organizations selected their preferred challenge) and on-site events at each university to get a behind-the-scenes view of the other university's research into sustainability.
- Coaching for each group supported the learning process and improved the personal development of each student.
- Peer review support from fellow students to learn both with and from one another, to meet like-minded people, and to shape each case by the shared knowledge of the group.
Aside from these core elements, we worked with (student-driven) organizations at the three universities to create a broad network to support the different groups and to provide engaging and inspiring sessions throughout the track.