As higher educational practices continue to evolve and adapt according to the 21st century competencies, technological advancements, and diverse learner profiles, it is important to reflect on approaches that positively impact student learning and stay relevant in the constantly changing educational contexts. This paper discusses business labs (for bachelor's students in International Business, at HAMK), that are implemented using Design Based Education (DBE) as the overarching approach while drawing from various pedagogical strategies like flipped classrooms, feedback, teachers as facilitators, collaborative learning, and so on. HAMK being an applied sciences institution, the concept of application of learning to solve real industry problems is at the core of shared goals and values. In line with this aim, business labs establish industry partnerships and receive challenges from companies willing to work with student groups in labs that that run across four months and are worth 25 credits in the bachelor’s program. Students, teachers and company representatives work towards a prototype, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for each challenge using design thinking stages as guiding steps, going back and forth as any real problem-solving entails. Students need to think critically, conduct research, collect data, iterate creative solutions, work collaboratively, test and improve their solutions, problem solve, communicate in professional contexts, and deal with unpredictable situations during the process. Such a course that mimics the work life is a perfect culmination of an educational program at an applied sciences institution where all skills learnt get exercised preparing the learners for real work life. This interdisciplinary implementation where teachers from different fields act as facilitators is an efficient use of teacher and student time and increases student motivation due to the impact they could achieve through their solutions as the challenges are not imaginary but relevant in real time. In addition, teachers here did not need to worry about the misuse of AI tools and the approach could be considered AI-proof as students needed to be spontaneous and critical at each step and AI tools for instance, could not solve the challenge and conduct the research for the students. While such implementations need good collaboration between teachers, industry partnerships, critical thinking, problem solving, and research skills among other key learner and teacher competencies, it is worthwhile for institutes with similar goals to work towards such approaches to keep learning immediately relevant while significantly building the future of learners.

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