About this course
Welcome to Course 2 of Module 1 in a series of 18 courses, carefully curated within the scope of the EU-funded project Challenger. All courses are designed and developed by professionals from prestigious VET providers.
During Module 1, you will develop your entrepreneurial mindset, understand the significance of innovation, foster problem identification and ideation skills, master the design thinking process, grasp news on relevant digital tools, and develop crucial soft skills like communication, motivation, and teamwork.
This module is just the beginning of your learning journey. As the first of three modules, it lays the groundwork for further exploration and specialization in applied research in VET. By the end of this module, you will have acquired valuable insights and skills and be prepared to delve deeper into advanced topics and challenges in the subsequent modules 2 and 3.
- Module 1: Learning the basics
- Module 2: Applied Phase 1: Working on hands-on projects for business
- Module 3: Applied Phase 2: Creating your own innovations
All these courses are offered for free. Register for participation and pass the multiple-choice tests at the end of every course. You will receive a confirmation of participation in the form of a digital badge. After completing all courses for each module, you will receive an innovation certificate that will prove the experience and knowledge you have gained.
The courses are aimed at learners in VET schools, bachelor students in universities, persons interested in developing their entrepreneurial mindset, persons interested in innovation and how to put ideas into practice, teachers/educators, industry experts, and community members.
Why Innovation?
What is actually an innovation?
Why should you develop your innovative skills?
How to start and how to think?
These are questions that will all be answered in this course!
Since the dawn of time, humans have been inventing to ease life. The first innovations were stone tools that could be used for everything from cutting to smashing. Since then, a lot has happened, and we are currently in what is considered the sixth innovation wave, which is defined by the green approach to solving the results of climate change. – A physical thing, a service, or an add-on to something already existing can be something that has not yet been launched in the local area and, with minor modifications to fit the area, is considered an innovation.
So, what is an innovation? A usual misconception is that innovator is a term reserved for old, wise (or sometimes even a bit wacky) men and that something needs to be a never-seen-before device. This is not true! Innovation can be anything from a product to a service to an organizing system. We have had so many great innovators who have already started the work for us; therefore, add-ons and improvements to existing innovations are, to the highest degree, innovations. Introducing a solution used in one area to a new area with modifications to meet the demands there – an innovation.
Imagine walking around your local supermarket, and once again, the apples are half rotten in the fruit department. You walk home without apples and start thinking about how this could be solved because it is not sustainable for the economy, the store, or the environment. Maybe the customers could pre-order their apples instead and avoid the fruits going bad before they get to the customers’ homes.
This is an innovation!
Well, this specific example may be unsuccessful for several reasons. For example, some customers may not always shop at the same store and want to be able to shop for apples even though they have not preordered them. How would the pre-order process work? Do they start ordering physically in the store? Do they call in their order? Digital system?
This would start an innovation cycle – a model developed by the Swedish organization »Unga Innovatörer« (Young Innovators).
This tool can be used in every step of an innovation cycle. The term innovation cycle is used to describe the process of how an innovation comes to life – from the first idea to the finished result. The Innov8 model is designed as an infinity symbol – and there is actually a purpose for that. When you have reached the eight steps, it is time to begin the next cycle. In this way, the innovation improves with each cycle, and you, as the innovator, get the chance to improve flaws that were impossible to correct in the previous cycle.
Sometimes, it can feel as if you have thought of everything, and then you have someone looking at your innovation from another perspective who finds weaknesses you have not considered. This is a good thing!
When working with an innovation, it is not cheating to take help from others – on the contrary, it is to be recommended!
Let us go back to the example of your local supermarket and the issue with the apples going bad before getting bought. When you have this idea, several stakeholders need to be considered. For example, the store manager and the other employees will look at the issue from one perspective, while the other customers will look at it from another. The wholesaler will have other opinions, and the apple farmers will see the problem from their perspective.
So, how do you respect everybody’s wishes, wants and needs? And even more importantly – how do you identify them? Well, you talk to them! Interviewing your target audience is a crucial step in the process. When doing so, you will realize that it is more common than not and that there are way more opinions than what would be reasonable to consider when developing your first innovation. This is where you must strain through how many problems your innovation can solve. It can also be beneficial to grade the problems that the people you talk with identify. Some might be crucial to solving to make the innovation relevant, and some could be considered “wants” instead, meaning that they are not critical for the innovation’s relevance in the market. By determining which problems your innovation will be able to solve at an early stage in the process, you will avoid making the project too large to handle. This may need to be reevaluated during the process and should be a significant part of the evaluation process (the eighth step in the Innov8 cycle).
– It could be aimed at a very specific target audience, like one specific team in an organization, or useful for a wider audience—still an innovation! Always keep the target audience in mind—create personas.
In some cases, your target audience is a large variety of people, and in other cases, your target audience may be quite specific. For the Apple service, the potential users are quite a wide group, while some innovations may only apply to one staff group at one specific company. It is easy to get carried away in the beginning of an innovation cycle and conclude that “this innovation is for everyone”. Be careful with this! By limiting your innovation’s potential users, you will have an easier way of deciding which problems your innovation should solve first and which ones are of lower priority.
– Why it is useful to have endured an innovation cycle, skills that can be used in other projects as well, training collaboration skills, how to handle obstacles/setbacks, contact with companies and being trained in professional contact, etc. – attractive skills on the job market! PBL!
You may wonder why these skills would be relevant for you to enhance. There are many skills that will be trained when developing an innovation.
Firstly, approaching an issue and trying to find a solution is much more like work-life than how we usually approach issues in today’s educational system. This approach is called problem-based learning, or PBL, which may be an expression you have heard before. Training in this method will make you better prepared for your upcoming career, no matter what you will be working with.
Working in a group aiming towards the same goal will train your collaborative skills. This ability is attractive on the job market and useful in many other situations.
During a process like this, you will experience both periods of great progress and setbacks. Being able to encourage and constructively criticize each other is a fine balance, but it is extremely valuable when mastered.
It can be nerve-wracking to contact someone you do not know and ask them for favours for the first time. However, training in these situations will prepare you better for job interviews or other career-related contexts. You may have already encountered similar situations and realized that it is a bit hard to know how to do it the first few times. In an innovation process, you will often find yourself in these situations! You might need an expert to answer a few questions or guide you in the right direction, another team member with a specific competence, another contact person at a company and so on. At the same time as this may be frightening, it is equally important to be trained.
– Innovations are needed for future global challenges, etc.; for those to be made, we need innovators who are trained in this mindset and way of working.
Now, we have touched on the general winnings of participating in an innovative project, but there are more winnings than that. At the beginning of this course, we touched upon the subject of innovation waves and mentioned that the wave that we are currently in is identified as “The green wave.”
There is a reason for that. The climate crisis is a fact; we must find new ways to live our everyday lives to adjust to it. We must find alternatives for generating heat, electricity, gas for our vehicles, overconsumption… These are issues that will not solve themselves. It is crucial for our survival that we find solutions; to do so, we need to be trained in this way of thinking. Starting the training even before graduating boosts your career and opportunities. Even if you plan on studying after graduation, you will have better opportunities to succeed by training these skills.
– Mindset
»Oh, this is not working, but – how could it be fixed/improved/developed?«
»I have this idea that is somewhat close to what xxx are doing – I contact them and develop my contact net and might receive another contact/new insights!«
»My idea requires intel from the target audience, my friend’s dad works in an industry that falls quite nicely into that frame, I will contact him!«
»My first idea fell through, but I use the insights from this innovation cycle to solve some of the problems that my first innovation was going to solve.«
»My first idea fell through, but I opened my eyes to other problems that the people I met during the first innovation cycle had that I might have solutions for. I will share my insights from my first innovation cycle with someone suitable to continue my work. «
»I have gotten stuck and cannot solve these problems on my own with the knowledge I have – I will include new group members/a mentor with the right expertise! «
Course materials
1.2-Challenger-Presentation-Course2-Why-innovationADDITIONAL MATERIAL / LINKS
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2019/12/30/back-to-basics-what-is-innovation/?sh=489540f24ca2 »Back to Basics: What is Innovation?« Forbes, different kinds of innovations from a business perspective, how to use the term in the right way
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-250-years-of-innovation-history-reveals-about-our-green-future/ Innovation waves, current green wave, what happens during an innovation wave in society,
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
