Educate to Innovate?What and How? will develop an evaluation framework for innovation training by interviewing leading innovators to learn what experiences prepared them and what training they would recommend. It addresses the questions of what are necessary skills for innovation and how should graduate students be trained in these skills; and then it proposes to use the results of the workshop to develop an instrument to be used as a rubric to describe and assess innovation training in NSF Integrated Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) graduate projects. In 2012, the IGERT program added a new thrust requiring projects to prepare graduate students for successfully working in innovation ecosystems.
The project will interview highly successful innovators in a variety of STEM fields and the arts to understand how they became innovators and what can be translated to create innovation environments for preparing future innovators. A consensus workshop will follow where 50 participates will review findings and determine what skills are necessary for innovation. Using the findings from the workshop, focus groups will inform a process for determining how these skills can be taught and what pedagogical strategies should be pursued.
The results of this process will be the creation of a draft assessment instrument to examine interdisciplinary STEM graduate projects that train students to be innovative and to see if they align with the findings of the workshops. The IGERT program will serve as a test environment because of its long-term focus on innovation, and in the past year its additional funding stream for Competitive Incentive Innovation funding to each new project for the purpose of underwriting innovation training activities. The instrument will provide a rubric for describing innovation training activities and for comparing activities and results between older IGERT projects and the newly funded cohort. The results of this descriptive evaluation will help inform the NSF and graduate educators about what techniques are being pursued and what produces innovation results.
For the U.S. to remain a global innovation leader, it must significantly enhance the capacity and ability of individuals and organizations to innovate. This has become a high national priority. Our universities are excellent at teaching the basic sciences and technologies which are essential for innovation, and several university programs focus on entrepreneurship, which helps translate innovation into marketable realities, but there is often a gap between the basic courses and entrepreneurship training. The results of this workshop will guide university efforts to improve innovation training by concrete examples of what works and a rubric for assessing their programs.
