This part of the course addresses a crucial process in science, technology, everyday cognition, as well as business: the generation of (radically) new knowledge—this process is the very center of almost every change, breakthrough, revolution, or innovation. Students will conduct a practical knowledge creation project in interdisciplinary teams. The goal of this project is to achieve an expertise in state-of-the-art knowledge creation techniques (and their theoretical background), such as dialogue, reflection, world café, making explicit implicit assumptions, U-theory/presencing, different modes of deep observation, conducting generative interviews, deep knowing/understanding, etc. This part of the course aims at practically experiencing this socio-epistemological process/technology of generating (radically) new (scientific) knowledge in an interdisciplinary and collaborative context.

The process of knowledge creation/innovation in this course is inspired by C.O.Scharmer's U-theory and concept of Presencing, which has been radically adapted and considerably further developed.

Phases of this part of the course

unit	theme/phase	Links
B0	Phase 0: Questions that matter Each student has to reflect and think about a “question that really matters” to her/him (individually). The goal is to individually find a topic/question that deeply concerns the particular student (be it a scientific, social, personal, etc. question). In the following unit these questions/topics will be presented and they are the basis for establishing common emergent thematic fields.	Link...
B1	Phase 1: Identifying emergent thematic fields and co-initiating emergent thematic fields will be identified a newly developed knowledge technology being based on the reflection and identification of the participants´ core beliefs and base concepts/assumptions in their questions/interests is applied knowledge creation teams (KCTs) will be formed around these emergent thematic fields	Link...
B2	Phase 2: Co-initiating KCTs, community-building, and observation strategy development knowledge creation teams (KCTs) are supposed to sharpen their thematic field team building develop a sketch for an observation strategy	Link...
B3	Phase 3: Negotiating observation strategy & observation design each KCT presents its elaborated thematic field and observation strategy/design develop a concrete observation design	Link...
B4	Phase 4: Deep observation KCTs totally immerse into the chosen thematic field by exploring it with a variety of methods for deep observation results have to be documented in a WWW/electronic form	Link...
B5	Phase 5: Creating collective sense organs and collective sense making by sharing knowledge about the experiences in the process of observation the KCTs try to gain a rough and initial collective understanding of their observations and of what wants to emerge in their respective thematic fields applied methods: world café and dialogue	Link...
B6	Phase 6: Presencing — Creating radically new knowledge each participant enters into a space of creating new knowledge in an individual process of letting-go and emergence reflection, silence, etc. in this process of presencing (U-theory; Scharmer 2007, Senge et al. 2004) both radically new and at the same time “organically grown” knowledge emerges out of a profound understanding of the thematic field	Link...
B7	Phase 7: Crystallizing & prototyping the resulting (still fragile) project idea from the phase of presencing is concretized in a period of self study and cooperative work in the KCTs the KCT starts to prototype the concrete project	Link...
B8	Phase 8: Creating new realities the prototypes are consolidated students are invited to use different media and materials for realizing their prototypes this final prototype/scenario is presented	Link...
B9	Phase 9: Overspill, theoretical backgorund, and reflection The theoretical background is presented and discussed The "observation group" presents its observations and starts a final round of reflection	Link...