Nowadays, there is a growing emphasis on equipping students with essential skills in data science, entrepreneurship, innovation, and sustainability to prepare them for a highly innovation-driven, deep-tech-dominated labor market and economy. Through the InnoEnergy (IE) program, we empower students by fostering these capacities through courses that integrate these skills within a structured-flexibility project-oriented framework. This framework allows them to test and experience various approaches, encouraging creativity, collaboration, and iterative problem-solving, while also providing a clear, structured pathway to guide their progress. By working with real challenges, students gain valuable insights and enhance their readiness to thrive in their professional careers.

This article aims to provide insights from the conceptual design to the practical implementation of the course Data-driven Challenges for Energy Engineers. Framed as part of IE, this course was conceived to develop an innovative project-based learning (PBL) experience where students combine three key pathways at the core of the IE philosophy: data-science tools, entrepreneurship, and project-based learning.

While conducting an exploratory search across IE university partners, we identified relevant courses that focused either on the theory of data science or entrepreneurship, or on project-based courses driving in one direction or the other. The closest IE asset we found was the Green Seed (GS), a competition where students form teams to develop projects over six months, combining technical and business tools to reach a maturity stage enabling them to present their work to investors. Although the GS is a great initiative, at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), we envisioned creating a permanent project-based course with a clear focus on data-based projects. Thus, we began designing the course to accommodate all these topics under a single framework.

The course creation project started with three clear premises: data-driven content, PBL, and entrepreneurial activities. However, we decided to add one more element to the mix: structured flexibility. This ensures the course fosters work based on the three mentioned topics while providing enough flexibility for students to maximize their adoption of the concepts. Moreover, structured flexibility allows students the freedom to explore and pivot during project development while following a clear progression structure. Based on prior experiences in other PBL courses, we sought to accommodate diverse student profiles, some inclined toward technical development and others toward entrepreneurship.

To address this, we introduced project tracks:
1. Technical Track: Focuses on improving technical skills, with entrepreneurship present but secondary to technical development.
2. Entrepreneurial Track: Emphasizes fostering entrepreneurial skills, building on the shared technical foundation, with a focus on business aspects.
3. Hybrid Track: Balances technical work and entrepreneurship equally.
4. We also allow internal flexibility, enabling group members to pursue individual pathways as long as they reach an agreement with their peers.

This article summarizes the course creation journey and its application in a real classroom during the fall semester of 2024. It includes a brief representation of the results, compiling a summary of the 15 projects developed by students, along with a feedback survey on their experiences.

Keywords: Project-Based Learning (PBL), Data-Driven Innovation, Entrepreneurship in Education.