Sep 29, 2025
Interview with Dr. Benjamin Kruppke: "For me, networking means creating something new together"
At TU Dresden, Connected Communities (CCs) play an active role in shaping international university life. Teachers and researchers from different countries develop joint teaching and research formats in this context. These are each coordinated by an active leader. One of these communities is led by Dr. Benjamin Kruppke, a materials scientist at TU Dresden. His community "Agile in Biomechanics" deals with agile teaching formats, interdisciplinary project work and European university development.
In this interview, Dr. Kruppke explains how an individual teaching idea became an international cooperation project and what conditions are crucial for this.
From the idea to the community
"I didn't start out with the aim of leading a community," says Dr. Kruppke looking back. What began as a collegial exchange quickly developed into a concrete project - with an agile teaching concept, an international team and regular exchanges across national and specialist borders.
The core of the Dresden Connected Community is the "Competence Atelier", a project-based course for advanced students. Here, small teams work on real issues from the fields of biomechanics, materials research or medical technology. They work independently, apply agile methods such as Scrum and reflect on their processes in retrospectives. This is accompanied by input on communication, task distribution and project organization. The aim is to impart not only specialist knowledge but also interdisciplinary skills, such as team responsibility and self-organization.
"We have noticed how much the students' thinking changes when they really have to make decisions - not on a small scale, but in the overall project," says Kruppke.
The path to the EUTOPIA world
The idea of further developing this format internationally led Dr. Kruppke to EUTOPIA. He was selected as the lead of a connected community at TU Dresden in the second of three funding rounds. "I was surprised at how open and feasible it was to get started. The application was short and the idea was well prepared." With support from TU Dresden, in particular from local facilitator Kerstin Le Merdy, a proposal was created to show how the Dresden model could be transferred to other contexts.
Today, the community works with partners from the University of Warwick (UK), the Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai in Cluj-Napoca (Romania), the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) and the Ca' Foscari University in Venice (Italy). The group is interdisciplinary, with participants from the fields of biomechanics, orthopaedics, electrical engineering and sociology.
Agile teaching as a space for experimentation
The collaboration in the "Agile in Biomechanics" community offers Kruppke and his students space to think about agile teaching from different perspectives. This is not only about the actual implementation of the course, but also about reflecting on the underlying methods and the question of how these could work in different university contexts.
Initial ideas were also discussed within the community as to how the teaching concept could be further developed for other target groups in the future, such as doctoral students. However, the focus so far has clearly been on implementation with students and establishing sustainable collaboration within the international partner network.
Challenges and aha moments
Of course, not everything went smoothly. Particularly in an international context, collaboration often comes up against structural limits. One example: Only the person in charge of a Connected Community, the so-called lead, receives budget funds for the project. The partner institutions do not formally receive any money of their own, although a distribution of funds is planned. "This makes it more difficult for everyone to feel equally responsible - not out of disinterest, but out of structural pragmatism," explains Dr. Kruppke.
And yet the collaboration works - partly because trust has grown. Kruppke sees great added value in how uncomplicated and reliable working together has become: "If I were to plan an EU project tomorrow, I would know exactly who to contact and that I would get an answer."
In addition, new ideas for research proposals, curricula or collaboration with practice partners often arise informally. "This long-term impact is something you can't plan at the beginning, but it develops with the community."
Farewell and outlook
Dr. Kruppke will be leaving TU Dresden in the autumn to take up a Chair at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He is handing over the project to a colleague, Dr. Franziska Alt, who will also continue to run the Competence Atelier. The community will remain active.
Kruppke's wish: "I hope that the students will remember this course - not just because of the topic, but because they really learned something. And if someone from the community says: 'We'd like to introduce this here. Will you help us?', then that would be a real success for me."
© Sven Ellger
Project Associate
NameKerstin Le Merdy
EUTOPIA MORE Local Facilitator
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