Comenius Teaching Fellow Grant for Stefania Boscari

Assistant Professor Dr. Stefania Boscari has received a Comenius Teaching Fellow Grant of € 50,000 from the National Knowledge Institute for Education (NKO) for her project “Embedding Diverse Perspectives and Inclusive Teamwork in Supply Chain Management Education.” The project aims to drive innovation at the course level by integrating diversity and inclusion (D&I) into supply chain management education.

Dr. Boscari’s project focuses on integrating D&I into Supply Chain Fundamentals, a compulsory course in the MSc Supply Chain Management (SCM) program. Supply chain management (SCM) education is traditionally technically oriented, with an emphasis on efficiency, optimization, and analytical decision-making. Yet real-world supply chain decisions are rarely purely technical: they require collaboration across functions, backgrounds, and perspectives.

Improving inclusive teamwork and decision quality

The challenge is to help students recognize D&I not as a separate or purely normative topic, but as a functional input to improved teamwork and decision-making. This project addresses that challenge by developing and implementing a design framework that enables students to systematically integrate diverse perspectives — such as functional roles, educational backgrounds, and diverse approaches to risk and uncertainty — when making complex supply chain management decisions.

Dr. Boscari explains: “The new framework conceptualizes D&I not as a stand-alone topic, but as a functional input to collective decision-making. It provides a structured approach for aligning team composition, guided reflection, and decision moments so that diversity becomes consequential for technical outcomes. This approach is implemented within the course through activities supporting a team-based simulation game, where inclusive teamwork directly affects performance trade-offs and results.”

The project will also involve SCM practitioners in the co-design and delivery of materials, as well as in workshops that build D&I-related competencies, further reinforcing the relevance of D&I for professional SCM practice. The D&I awareness and competencies developed in the Supply Chain Fundamentals course will form a foundation for subsequent courses within the MSc Supply Chain Management program.

NKO and Comenius Teaching Fellow Grants

The Dutch National Education Institute (NKO, Dutch abbreviation) part of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) – aims to use knowledge from research to improve the quality of education in the Netherlands. It does so by coordinating and funding educational research, and by making the results of this research accessible and useful for educational practice and policy. The aim of the Comenius programme is to give impetus to educational innovation and improvements by professionals in higher education. Comenius Teaching Fellow Grants are meant for small-scale innovations in an educational institutions. Proposed projects must be implemented within the context of a course, subject learning path or skills trajectory. The educational improvement should directly benefit Dutch higher education students.