BioSustainability Design Novo Nordisk Foundation Fellowship Programme
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Skills and Expertise You Achieve

As a BioSustainability Design fellow, you can expect to develop skills and expertise in a range of areas that will be valuable whether you choose to work in an established company or become an entrepreneur.

Professional Skills

Innovation expertise – the design thinking method

Need discovery

  • Framing problems as clear, actionable “needs” and recognizing opportunities
  • Talking to stakeholders across the value chain and doing field observations
  • Prioritizing needs based on impact, feasibility, and market potential

Idea generation

  • Structured brainstorming and creative techniques
  • Turning needs into many possible product/service/business concepts
  • Combining technical, consumer, and business perspectives in ideation

Concept validation

  • Testing assumptions with hosts, experts, and potential customers
  • Assessing technical feasibility, IP potential, regulatory and market risks
  • Comparing and down‑selecting concepts using clear entrepreneurial criteria

Implementation

  • Prototyping (food products, services, digital tools) and iterating on user feedback
  • Building and testing business models (value proposition, pricing, channels, partners)
  • Exploring IP, regulatory pathways, and routes to market or spin‑out/startup creation
  • Pitching and communicating the concept to industry partners, accelerators, and investors.

Turning sustainability into innovation opportunities

  • Identify where circularity, better resource efficiency, or plant‑based shifts can create both environmental and business value.
  • Learn to balance sustainability ambitions with real‑world constraints like cost, regulation, consumer acceptance and existing infrastructure
  • Become a driver of change in a conservative system by learning to engage stakeholders around sustainability goals and navigate resistance or trade‑offs.

Leadership and collaboration skills

Self‑leadership and team roles

  • Understanding and communicating your strengths, values, and “personal mission”
  • Taking responsibility for decisions, uncertainty and setbacks
  • Adapting your role in the team over time (leader, facilitator, expert, listener)

Everyday teamwork in interdisciplinary groups

  • Working productively with people from very different professional backgrounds
  • Giving and receiving constructive feedback; handling disagreement and conflict
  • Co‑creating a shared team mission, priorities, and ways of working

Stakeholder management and collaboration

  • Building trust with hosts (companies, farms, municipalities) and mentors
  • Running interviews, workshops and co‑creation sessions with busy practitioners
  • Translating between “languages” (technical, business, operations, policy, consumer)
  • Leading change and driving a project forward

Understanding of the food system and sustainability challenges

Understand the whole food system

  • Map the agri‑food value chain from farm to fork and spot “lock‑ins” that keep unsustainable practices in place.
  • Use systems thinking to understand how farmers, processors, retailers, foodservice and consumers influence each other.

Work with concrete sustainability challenges

  • Deep‑dive into three core themes: reducing food waste, strengthening plant‑based value chains, and valorizing side‑
  • Translate broad goals (e.g. lower emissions, better resource use) into specific, measurable problem statements at host companies.

Personal Skills

Clarity on purpose and direction

  • Better insight into what type of role (entrepreneur, intrapreneur, specialist, leader) fits you.
  • Confidence to act in uncertainty

Practicing fast learning cycles instead of waiting for perfect information

  • Becoming comfortable taking initiative, making decisions, and handling setbacks.
  • Stronger reflective habits.

Regular reflection on team dynamics, personal strengths, and growth areas

  • Tools to give and receive feedback in a way that supports learning rather than defensiveness.
  • Resilience and stamina

Network and community

  • Becoming part of a mission‑driven peer group and alumni community
  • Network in the industry
  • A strengthened identity as a “change agent” in sustainable food, not just a specialist in one discipline.

Maintaining motivation in a long innovation journey

  • Skills to balance ambition, workload, and personal well‑being.
  • A powerful sense of belonging and identity

Communication skills

  • Training in explaining complex technical or sustainability topics in clear, accessible language to non‑experts.
  • Tailoring messages and pitches to different audiences (hosts, mentors, managers, investors).
  • Asking good questions, running interviews and workshops, and giving/receiving constructive feedback.

Collaboration skills

  • Working effectively in small, diverse teams under time pressure and uncertainty.
  • Facilitating joint decisions, aligning on a shared mission, and managing disagreements productively.
  • Building and maintaining professional relationships across the value chain (from farmers to retailers and start‑ups to corporates).