For students of the MSc Design Thinking for Sustainability, the Host Company Project is where knowledge and skills acquired over the first trimester of the programme are applied for genuine, real-world impact. Over ten intensive weeks, student teams embed themselves in real organisational challenges, working on current problems that actually matter to the companies and communities involved.
Our students bring two key traits to the host companies they work with:
- Training in human-centred research and design thinking, allowing in-depth interrogation of difficult challenges
- Dedicated innovative capacity for organisations with low bandwidth, operating with no inherited assumptions, no internal politics, and no “the way we’ve always done it” mindset
In this capacity, they must develop critical competencies that can only be truly tested in the real world – navigating uncertainty, managing relationships, synthesising stakeholder needs, and being able to present solutions that can withstand genuine scrutiny.
The outputs are substantive: structured stakeholder research, mapped systems and service journeys, tested prototypes, and recommendations grounded in current sustainability practice. These aren’t reports filed and forgotten – several projects from previous cohorts have moved directly toward implementation.
For our 2026 host company partners like Musgrave navigating sustainable retail at scale, Pocket Forests making urban greening lasting and accessible, Dublin City Council balancing public need with systemic constraint, or Oxfam working at the intersection of humanitarian and environmental impact—the student teams brought structured curiosity and methodological rigour to challenges that resist easy answers.
The Host Company Project is the point where design thinking stops being a framework and starts being a practice—for students and host organisations alike.
You may view the complete list of projects and student solutions below. Alternatively, you may also view it directly on our Issuu: Host Company Projects 2026.