Although education programmes are constantly being renewed, innovation does not always lead to anchored changes in educational practice. One explanation is that educational innovation evolves more dynamics than often is assumed. Instead of following a well-designed plan, the core activities of innovation leaders hinge on the ability to swiftly identify and interpret situations with which they are confronted. This suggests that the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous (VUCA) innovation process requires a specific repertoire from innovation leaders, including a better understanding of their internal decision-making processes. In our search for a fitting repertoire, we discovered the capacity for “situational awareness” as a concept to help understand complex situations and to determine very quickly what needs to be done. Additionally, we focus on how innovation leaders make decisions at significant moments during the innovation process in higher education. We describe how our discovery leads to the development of a lens for innovation leaders, with situational awareness as a starting point, and supplemented with the filtering, framing and guiding function of beliefs as steering principles of internal decision making-processes. This allows to gain a better understanding of how the innovation leader identifies critical situations and responds in terms of interpretation and action.
Although education programmes are constantly being renewed, innovation does not always lead to anchored changes in educational practice. One explanation is that educational innovation evolves more dynamics than often is assumed. Instead of following a well-designed plan, the core activities of innovation leaders hinge on the ability to swiftly identify and interpret situations with which they are confronted. This suggests that the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous (VUCA) innovation process requires a specific repertoire from innovation leaders, including a better understanding of their internal decision-making processes. In our search for a fitting repertoire, we discovered the capacity for “situational awareness” as a concept to help understand complex situations and to determine very quickly what needs to be done. Additionally, we focus on how innovation leaders make decisions at significant moments during the innovation process in higher education. We describe how our discovery leads to the development of a lens for innovation leaders, with situational awareness as a starting point, and supplemented with the filtering, framing and guiding function of beliefs as steering principles of internal decision making-processes. This allows to gain a better understanding of how the innovation leader identifies critical situations and responds in terms of interpretation and action.
Higher educational institutions incorporate projects into their curricula, in which students, together with educators, researchers and professionals from practice, try to find solutions for real, societal problems, to develop relevant skills. Because such solutions are increasingly digital with high impact on society, ethical responsibility is an important part of these skills. In this study, we analyze two cases of digital innovation projects in higher education in which the concept of the Ethical Matrix is adapted and integrated in a Value Sensitive Design approach and applied by educators (case 1) and by students (case 2). We find that an adapted version of the Ethical Matrix supports educators and students in taking values of different types of stakeholders into account which leads to different design choices.
MULTIFILE
Energy transition is key to achieving a sustainable future. In this transition, an often neglected pillar is raising awareness and educating youth on the benefits, complexities, and urgency of renewable energy supply and energy efficiency. The Master Energy for Society, and particularly the course “Society in Transition”, aims at providing a first overview on the urgency and complexities of the energy transition. However, educating on the energy transition brings challenges: it is a complex topic to understand for students, especially when they have diverse backgrounds. In the last years we have seen a growing interest in the use of gamification approaches in higher institutions. While most practices have been related to digital gaming approaches, there is a new trend: escape rooms. The intended output and proposed innovation is therefore the development and application of an escape room on energy transition to increase knowledge and raise motivation among our students by addressing both hard and soft skills in an innovative and original way. This project is interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary due to the complexity of the topic; it consists of three different stages, including evaluation, and requires the involvement of students and colleagues from the master program. We are confident that this proposed innovation can lead to an improvement, based on relevant literature and previous experiences in other institutions, and has the potential to be successfully implemented in other higher education institutions in The Netherlands.
Students in Higher Music Education (HME) are not facilitated to develop both their artistic and academic musical competences. Conservatoires (professional education, or ‘HBO’) traditionally foster the development of musical craftsmanship, while university musicology departments (academic education, or ‘WO’) promote broader perspectives on music’s place in society. All the while, music professionals are increasingly required to combine musical and scholarly knowledge. Indeed, musicianship is more than performance, and musicology more than reflection—a robust musical practice requires people who are versed in both domains. It’s time our education mirrors this blended profession. This proposal entails collaborative projects between a conservatory and a university in two cities where musical performance and musicology equally thrive: Amsterdam (Conservatory and University of Amsterdam) and Utrecht (HKU Utrechts Conservatorium and Utrecht University). Each project will pilot a joint program of study, combining existing modules with newly developed ones. The feasibility of joint degrees will be explored: a combined bachelor’s degree in Amsterdam; and a combined master’s degree in Utrecht. The full innovation process will be translated to a transferable infrastructural model. For 125 students it will fuse praxis-based musical knowledge and skills, practice-led research and academic training. Beyond this, the partners will also use the Comenius funds as a springboard for collaboration between the two cities to enrich their respective BA and MA programs. In the end, the programme will diversify the educational possibilities for students of music in the Netherlands, and thereby increase their professional opportunities in today’s job market.
The pace of technology advancements continues to accelerate, and impacts the nature of systems solutions along with significant effects on involved stakeholders and society. Design and engineering practices with tools and perspectives, need therefore to evolve in accordance to the developments that complex, sociotechnical innovation challenges pose. There is a need for engineers and designers that can utilize fitting methods and tools to fulfill the role of a changemaker. Recognized successful practices include interdisciplinary methods that allow for effective and better contextualized participatory design approaches. However, preliminary research identified challenges in understanding what makes a specific method effective and successfully contextualized in practice, and what key competences are needed for involved designers and engineers to understand and adopt these interdisciplinary methods. In this proposal, case study research is proposed with practitioners to gain insight into what are the key enabling factors for effective interdisciplinary participatory design methods and tools in the specific context of sociotechnical innovation. The involved companies are operating at the intersection between design, technology and societal impact, employing experts who can be considered changemakers, since they are in the lead of creative processes that bring together diverse groups of stakeholders in the process of sociotechnical innovation. A methodology will be developed to capture best practices and understand what makes the deployed methods effective. This methodology and a set of design guidelines for effective interdisciplinary participatory design will be delivered. In turn this will serve as a starting point for a larger design science research project, in which an educational toolkit for effective participatory design for socio-technical innovation will be designed.
