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.
This paper studies the productive role of innovation in organisations. Using the post-structuralist insight that innovation is an open concept that can become performative, we shift the emphasis from analysing innovations themselves to analysing how the concept of innovation affects the organisational practices through which it acquires meaning. Deploying this framework, we studied the development of an innovation unit within TUI, a corporate tour operator. We found that actors interpreted innovation in different ways and that initially the innovation unit was considered a failure. The subsequent dramatisation of this failure resulted in a new version of this innovation unit that strengthened established actors and institutions within the organisation. Our study shows how the use of the concept of innovation in an organisation can both stimulate and hamper its innovativeness. Addressing this paradox requires sensitivity to the concept's productive role and evaluations of innovation that look beyond accomplished results.
Boekbespreking van Serendipiteit. De ongezochte vondst. Het boek opent met een verzameling van citaten die direct of indirect met het onderwerp samenhangen. Daarna volgt een kort voorwoord van Hans Clevers, de toenmalige president van de KNAW, die een lans breekt voor serendipiteit in de biologie. Verder bevat het boek een vertaling van het Perzisch sprookje over de prinsen van Sarandib (Sri Lanka), plus de brief van Horace Walpole waarin hij op grond van dit oude gedicht het begrip “serendipiteit” munt. Dan pas wordt de lezer getrakteerd op een inleiding over serendipiteit. Deze wordt gevolgd door een e-mail correspondentie over hetzelfde thema tussen de beide auteurs en een inventarisatie van aansprekende voorbeelden van het fenomeen
