(821.pdf) INNOVATION COMPETENCY DEVELOPMENT AND ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION

摘要

Changes in higher education paradigms have placed at the forefront the development of knowledge,skills and attitudes that will equip students with the competencies necessary to succeed in theworkplace. In innovation pedagogy, a learning approach in which students have the opportunity tobecome innovative members of learning organizations, the social aspects of working and learning areemphasized. Group processes where learning happens in multidisciplinary teams form an essentialpart of learning. The aim of innovation pedagogy is to generate environments in which a competitiveadvantage can be created by combining different kinds of know-how. Innovation competenciessharpened by innovation pedagogy are the key to acquiring new competitive advantages via knowhow.This paper describes the progress of an ongoing project on the development and assessment ofinnovation competencies. The project has received the support of funding through the Life-longLearning Programme of the European Union. The main objective of the project is to create aninstrument that will measure outcomes when using innovation pedagogy. The instrument focuses onassessing students' performance in situations that produce samples of capacities and skills that makeup innovation competencies.The Innovation Competency Development Project includes four European partner universities: TurkuUniversity of Applied Sciences from Finland, Universitat Politècnica de València from Spain, Universityof Applied Sciences Hamburg from Germany and Karel de Grote-Hogeschool Antwerpen fromBelgium. Each partner heads a different part of the project, which will finalize at the end of November2013. The first two work packages, which represent approximately 50 % of the total workload of thefive packages, have concluded at the time of writing. The Innovation Competence Barometer (ICB) iscurrently being piloted in the four universities in order to complete the validation procedure of theinstrument. The five work packages will be described in the paper and preliminary trial results will bepresented.The main contribution of the project is the discussion on how, through using the ICB and testing theresults of different teaching and learning methods, universities can get up-to-date information on theusefulness of the methods and can make decisions on their implementation on a wider basis.Ultimately, it is the businesses and organizations that will benefit from the newly educatedprofessionals who will possess better qualifications and be better prepared to act in diverse innovationprocesses in their working lives.