Purpose Collaboration between universities and industry is increasingly perceived as a vehicle to enhance innovation. Educational institutions are encouraged to build partnerships and multidisciplinary projects based around real-world open problems. Projects need to benefit student learning, not only the organisations looking for innovations. The context of this study is a multidisciplinary innovation project, as experienced by the students of an University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The purpose of this paper is to unfold students’ conceptions of the learning experience, to help teachers and curriculum designers to organise optimal conditions and processes, and support competence development. The research question was: How do students in higher professional education experience their learning in a multidisciplinary innovation project? Design/methodology/approach The study took a phenomenographic approach. The data were collected in the form of weekly diaries, maintained by the cultural management and social services students (n=74) in a mandatory multidisciplinary innovation project in professional higher education in Finland. The diary data were analysed using thematic inductive analysis. Findings The results of the study revealed that students’ understood the learning experience in relation to solvable conflicts and unusual situations they experienced during the project, while becoming aware of and claiming their collaborative agency and internalising phases of an innovation process. The competences as learning outcomes that students could name as developed related to content knowledge, different personal characteristics, social skills, emerging leadership skills, creativity, future orientation, social skills, technical, crafting and testing skills and innovation implementation-related skills, such as marketing, sales and entrepreneurship planning skills. However, future orientation and implementation planning skills showed more weakly than other variables in the data. Practical implications The findings suggest that curriculum design should enable networked, student-led and teacher supported pedagogical innovation processes that involve a whole path from future thinking and idea development through prototyping to implementation planning of the novel solution. Teachers promote deep comprehension of the innovation process, monitor and ease the pain of conflict if it threatens motivation, offer assessment tools and help in recognising gaps in individual competences and development needs, promote more future-oriented, concrete and implementable outcomes, and facilitate in bridging from innovation towards entrepreneurship planning. Originality/value The multidisciplinary innovation project described in this study provides a pedagogical way to connect higher education to the practises of society. These results provide encouraging findings for organising multidisciplinary project activities between education and working life. The paper, therefore, has significant value for teachers and entrepreneurship educators in designing curriculum and facilitating projects. The study promotes the dissemination of innovation development programmes in between education and work organisations also in other than technical and commercial fields.
Learning for innovation is a central element in European policymaking in developing higher education. Students often learn in project settings together with work organizations developing new solutions, products and services. These authentic creative, social and collaborative settings offer an attractive learning environment. The aim of this study was to determine the factors involved in individual innovation competence to be able to design, tutor and assess the pedagogical processes where authentic open-ended tasks are being solved transforming novel ideas into usable products or services. After defining the extraction criteria using a limited sample of articles, a bias-assessed systematic review was conducted of empirical research articles published in 2006-2015. Twenty-eight journal articles were ultimately included in the review. Despite the volume of academic literature in this field, comparatively few studies providing findings addressing the review objectives could be found. There was, however a reasonable weight of research evidence to support the result. The findings suggest that personal characteristics, such as flexibility, achievement orientation, motivation and engagement, self-esteem and self-management, future orientation, creative thinking skills, social skills, project management skills, and content knowledge and making skills can be needed in collaborative innovation process. These findings have implications for pedagogical innovation processes and for competency-based assessment.
This article focuses on how experimentation-based pedagogy has been pursued by one Finnish university of applied sciences (UAS) in working life environments in the context of the Triple Helix. This article focuses on efforts to combine together situated learning, organisational improvisation and cultural-historical activity theory. In this higher education organisation, the students' multidisciplinary innovation projects are used to improve the students' skills in performing experiments with variations. The article demonstrates how pilot trainings were organised for teachers and their networks to equip them to project facilitators in a new mode of activity. It also reports on the undergraduates' group demonstrations and evaluations based on a recent sample of their subsequent innovation projects. The small-scale content analysis was conducted to identify areas for further development. According to the activity theory, the crucial learning outcome of the UAS educational projects should be a collective reflection on practices. In addition, the two essentials of reflection and learning are the tools available for mirroring and continuous concept formation. According to the findings, there were prominent achievements in ethnographic fieldwork but more supportive arrangements and training is needed to promote especially the concept formation.
University–industry collaboration produces networks that may be capable of innovations, such as novel products and services. The collaboration projects also need to benefit student learning, yet teachers have little clarity with regard to innovation competence development. Individual innovation competence is a set of personal characteristics, knowledge, skills and attitudes that are connected to create concretised and implemented novelties via collaboration in complex innovation processes. The paper reports on the findings from the development and validation of an individual innovation competence assessment tool. The aim is to determine which individual innovation competences are significant in university–industry collaboration and which of these competences are sensitive to educational interventions. The study used a three-phase method involving development of the questionnaire items, validation in teacher and student panels, and a pilot pre- and post-survey study. All seven domains of individual innovation competences were significant and sensitive to educational intervention (a multidisciplinary innovation project conducted with industry). The most responsive competence domains regarding change were concretisation and implementation planning skills, and project management skills. The paper concludes with application opportunities for the tool and recommendations for further research.
Working life-integrated innovation projects have become a common part of education. An innovation project is a social phenomenon of learning that brings the competence of several individuals together in a social process through which a novel idea is turned into practical reality to convey value to its users. University–industry innovation collaboration research has mainly understood the role of the university as a partner responsible for research. However, these projects are often based on student teamwork, an open challenge from real working life and a predefined intention to produce a concrete, novel, and innovative product, service, or new operating model into use. The outcomes are meant to be taken into use to convey value for business and society. A paucity of empirical research exists on the development and assessment of these innovation education programs based on their effects on the surrounding society. The variables that are important in studying the effects of innovation education projects on surrounding society, participating companies, and organisations must be identified. In this study, a set of effect measurement scale variables were discovered through a document analysis and focus group interviews. The findings imply the importance of recognising the effects of the project both on the clients' and their organisations' goals (project output, benefits of participation, and what survives) and the wider impact of the projects on the surrounding society (impacts on the daily lives of citizens; well-being and health; economy, ecology, digitalisation; and social matters). Thus, a preliminary impact assessment model is suggested. Keywords: Innovation project, university-industry collaboration, impact, higher education, innovation pedagogy, document analysis, focus group
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