Innovation is crucial for higher education to ensure high-quality curricula that address the changing needs of students, labor markets, and society as a whole. Substantial amounts of resources and enthusiasm are devoted to innovations, but often they do not yield the desired changes. This may be due to unworkable goals, too much complexity, and a lack of resources to institutionalize the innovation. In many cases, innovations end up being less sustainable than expected or hoped for. In the long term, the disappointing revenues of innovations hamper the ability of higher education to remain future proof. Against the background of this need to increase the success of educational innovations, our colleague Klaartje van Genugten has explored the literature on innovations to reveal mechanisms that contribute to the sustainability of innovations. Her findings are synthesized in this report. They are particularly meaningful for directors of education programs, curriculum committees, educational consultants, and policy makers, who are generally in charge of defining the scope and set up of innovations. Her report offers a comprehensive view and provides food for thought on how we can strive for future-proof and sustainable innovations. I therefore recommend reading this report.
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Higher education (HE) is engaged in a variety of educational innovations, as well as professional development initiatives (PDIs) to support teachers in attaining the required expertise. To improve teacher professional learning and development (PLD) and innovation processes, it is important to understand whether, how and why different PLD practices work for different innovations, contexts and populations. However, research is characterized by descriptive, single case studies and lacks a common framework to relate research findings. To address this shortcoming, this study collected and compared a wide variety of cases to develop a typology of practices. The results showed that educational innovations and teacher PLD were typically configured in three ways: (1) the focus is on implementing a new form of education and teacher learning is used as a means to this end, (2) the focus is on teachers’ professional learning and the educational innovations are spin-offs, and (3) the focus is on stimulating innovations and teacher learning is a side-effect. These types of configurations differed regarding the educational innovation, required teacher expertise, professional development initiatives, teacher learning, and outcome measures. The typology serves as a framework that may help to reflect on practices, bridge disciplines, and formulate hypotheses for future research.
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The importance of teaching engineering students innovation development is commonly clearly understood. It is essential to achieve products which are attractive and profitable in the market. To achieve this, an institute of engineering education has to provide students with needed knowledge, skills and attitudes including both technical and business orientation. This is important especially for SME’s. Traditionally, education of engineering provides students with basic understanding how to solve common technical problems. However companies need wider view to achieve new products. Universities of applied Sciences in Oulu and Eindhoven want to research what is the today’s educational situation for this aim, to find criteria to improve the content of the educational system, and to improve the educational system. Important stakeholders are teachers and students within the institute but also key-persons in companies. The research is realized by questionnaires and interviews from which a current situation can be found. The research will also include the opinion of management who give possibilities to change the curriculum. By this research more insight will be presented about how to re-design a current curriculum. The research will act as basis for this discussion in SEFI-conference about formulating a curriculum that includes elements for wide-ranging knowledge and skills to achieve innovations especially in SME’s.
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The importance of teaching engineering students innovation development is commonly clearly understood. It is essential to achieve products which are attractive and profitable in the market. To achieve this, an institute of engineering education has to provide students with needed knowledge, skills and attitudes including both technical and business orientation. This is important especially for SME’s. Traditionally, education of engineering provides students with basic understanding how to solve common technical problems. However companies need wider view to achieve new products. Universities of applied Sciences in Oulu and Eindhoven want to research what is the today’s educational situation for this aim, to find criteria to improve the content of the educational system, and to improve the educational system. Important stakeholders are teachers and students within the institute but also key-persons in companies. The research is realized by questionnaires and interviews from which a current situation can be found. The research will also include the opinion of management who give possibilities to change the curriculum. By this research more insight will be presented about how to re-design a current curriculum. The research will act as basis for this discussion in SEFI-conference about formulating a curriculum that includes elements for wide-ranging knowledge and skills to achieve innovations especially in SME’s.
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Educational innovations often tend to fail, mainly because teachers and school principals do not feel involved or are not allowed to have a say. Angela de Jong's dissertation shows the importance of school principals and teachers leading 'collaborative innovation' together. Collaborative innovation requires a collaborative, distributed approach involving both horizontal and vertical working relationships in a school. Her research shows that teams with more distributed leadership have a more collaborative 'spirit' to improve education. Team members move beyond formal (leadership) roles, and work more collectively on school-wide educational improvement from intrinsic motivation. De Jong further shows that school principals seek a balance in steering and providing space. She distinguished three leadership patterns: Team Player, Key Player, Facilitator. Team players in particular are important for more collaborative innovation in a school. They balance between providing professional space to teachers (who look beyond their own classroom) and steering for strategy, frameworks, boundaries, and vision. This research took place in schools working with the program of Foundation leerKRACHT, a program implemented by more than a thousand schools (primary, secondary, and vocational education). The study recommends, towards school principals and teachers, and also towards trainers, policymakers, and school board members, to reflect more explicitly on their roles in collaborative innovation and talk about those roles.
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Indigenous tourism plays a crucial role in sustainable development, cultural heritage preservation, and social equity. However, the integration of innovation in Indigenous tourism remains fragmented and underexplored. This research employs the Theory, Context, Characteristics, and Methodology (TCCM) framework to systematically review 131 studies from major academic databases, offering the first comprehensive analysis of innovations in Indigenous tourism. The findings highlight China as a leading contributor in this field, emphasizing incremental innovations and their social and economic impacts. Despite progress, critical areas such as well-being, education, community empowerment, and environmental impacts remain underrepresented. To address these shortcomings, the study proposes ten propositions to advance theoretical and practical understanding in the sector. These insights guide future research and policy-making, strengthening Indigenous tourism's capacity to foster sustainable development, protect cultural heritage, and empower communities while addressing existing challenges in implementing innovations.
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This paper focuses on the topical and problematic area of social innovations. The aim of this paper is to develop an original approach to the allocation of social innovations, taking into account characteristics such as the degree of state participation, the scope of application, the type of initiations as well as the degree of novelty, which will be elaborated on further in this article. In order to achieve this goal, the forty-two most successful social innovations were identified and systematized. The results of this study demonstrated that 73.5% of social innovations are privately funded, most of them operating on an international level with a high degree of novelty. Moreover, 81% of all social innovations are civic initiatives. Social innovations play an important role in the growth of both developed and less developed countries alike as highlighted in our extensive analysis
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Educational escape rooms (EERs) are increasingly used in education as learning innovations for non-digital and game-based learning (GBL) since EERs positively influence student motivation. They are common in educational fields where skills developments are vital such as STEM subjects and healthcare. However, EERs are marginally implemented in entrepreneurship education (EE) because there is a lack of evaluated design elements to guide the creation of EER in this context, which hampers their wider adoption. Therefore, in this study, we evaluated design elements for EERs in EE. We are particularly concerned with experiential EE since EERs are well suited for experiential learning. We used a research-through-design approach and created an EER based on 11 design elements derived from the literature on social cognitive theory, entrepreneurship competence, and gamification. We created and evaluated the EER in two cycles with two diverse groups of students at a university of applied sciences in the Netherlands. We contribute to the literature and practice of experiential EE by presenting evaluated design elements for EERs. We show which design elements work well and which do not. We also present a comprehensively designed EER that educational professionals can implement in their experiential EE programs.
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It is important for the current small and medium sized companies to innovate and thereby still to be able to compete with the cheaper companies from the east. Within Fontys University a project has been started to develop an innovative education for its future curricula. More attention is paid to competence learning and 'learn to learn'-principles instead of cognitive learning. This has resulted in a so-called 'major-minor' system. In the Netherlands this system of education is commonly used at the Universities. The major, at Fontys, is a three-year primary education, which aims to develop the student's discipline. The minor are two education entities restricted, for the size of 30 ECTS, which students can choose. Within the Fontys University a study has started to develop a minor education on the topic "strategically decision-making on innovations in a SME". Fontys wants to train its students for this task in the SME, because it is assumed that many higher educated personnel will find work in the SME. Furthermore it is assumed that there is a growing need for higher educated personnel in possession of competences about strategic decision-making and implementing an innovative organisation. In the autumn of 2006, as a result of the present developments, a minor will be started on the topic 'strategically decision-making on innovations'. This paper describes the progress of the developments of the minor.
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Background Literature on self-management innovations has studied their characteristics and position in healthcare systems. However, less attention has been paid to factors that contribute to successful implementation. This paper aims to answer the question: which factors play a role in a successful implementation of self-management health innovations? Methods We conducted a narrative review of academic literature to explore factors related to successful implementation of self-management health innovations. We further investigated the factors in a qualitative multiple case study to analyse their role in implementation success. Data were collected from nine self-management health projects in the Netherlands. Results Nine factors were found in the literature that foster the implementation of self-management health innovations: 1) involvement of end-users, 2) involvement of local and business partners, 3) involvement of stakeholders within the larger system, 4) tailoring of the innovation, 5) utilisation of multiple disciplines, 6) feedback on effectiveness, 7) availability of a feasible business model, 8) adaption to organisational changes, and 9) anticipation of changes required in the healthcare system. In the case studies, on average six of these factors could be identified. Three projects achieved a successful implementation of a self-management health innovation, but only in one case were all factors present. Conclusions For successful implementation of self-management health innovation projects, the factors identified in the literature are neither necessary nor sufficient. Therefore, it might be insightful to study how successful implementation works instead of solely focusing on the factors that could be helpful in this process.
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