## 5 Case Studies
### DBL in a Course on Innovation Management in Information and Communication Technology  
The first case study presents an activity guided by DBL in a cross-domain held during a course on innovation management in information and communication technology (ICT) within the Master's degree in Informatics at University of Zaragoza. This exercise aimed at explaining the relevance of public investment in Research, Development, and Innovation (R&D&I) to improve the life standards of citizens. In a general way, most of the public, including ICT Bachelor's students, see R&D&I as a way to improve knowledge and technology. Nevertheless, several studies [77; 78; 79] relate the national level of investment in R&D&I and life standards, because there are implications that go beyond the results of an R&D&I activity: for R&D&I, more qualified people are required; more qualified people are usually more critical towards governments and their politics; this criticism has to be managed through the most advanced social politics; and so on. Traditional approaches to teaching this topic typically involve a master class featuring several charts that presents the public investment in R&D&I made by different countries. It is usual to include data of the local country and of other ones that correspond with well-known advanced countries that are references in its neighbourhood (for instance, in Spain, it is usual to include data from Germany, UK, or France). The main problem of this approach is that students just receive the information as a conclusion, without the opportunity of following the diagnosis process (or just viewing it in a slide). The relevance of being part of this diagnosis process must relate to understanding the role of R&D&I public funds in the growth of a country (the answer to the following question: Why do governments have to invest public money in R&D&I?). A DBL approach offers a solution by involving students in the diagnosis process, allowing them to contribute and understand the rationale behind the allocation of public funds to R&D&I. This exercise tried to validate this hypothesis concerning the relation between the national level of investment in R&D&I of a country and its life standards by analysing, and not only visualizing, data related to R&D&I investment and life standards provided by Eurostat. For this purpose, reports from Eurostat containing relevant information and datasets about the topic provided the context of the activity. It was considered that the level as well as the maturity of the students, as part of a Master's degree, should have guaranteed the understanding of the data and the concepts managed in these datasets. The students had to work with the datasets to find relations between public investment in R&D&I and life standards and extract conclusions. That is, the datasets were the blackboardto work on, and the solution to the activity was the information extracted from the datasets through analysis. During the course-scripting phase, the teacher establishes the intended learning outcomes of the activity and prepares the material (documents and datasets) for it. In this case, the following reports from Eurostat were selected from their website: [80; 81; 82; 83; 84; 85; 86]. The activity is defined, and the documents to be handed out to the students are prepared by the teacher. The teacher checks that they have enough data resources to use in the lesson; in this case, the teacher did not modify the datasets. The activity lasted 2 h, and it was conducted in a computer room. During the lesson flow, the following steps were followed:  
1. Description of activity context (presenting the learning activity). The teacher explained the hypothesis: \"investment in R&D&I improves life standards\".