Teachers as Innovators
Future Innovators
NESTA
Britain needs to support and develop innovation in its young people more if it is to stay competitive in the global market of the future, where innovative skills will be highly prized. One initiative that will fund and nurture new ideas to push these skills into formal and informal educational establishments is NESTA’s Future Innovators.
Keywords: innovation, funding, enterprise, competition, employees, ideas
Future Innovators is a programme designed to foster the abilities and outlooks of young people, to become innovators of the future. It is about increasing the UK’s ability to innovate through both informal and formal education by underpinning the skills and attitudes that generate innovation.
Through Future Innovators, young people will be encouraged to develop self-belief, ambition, self-awareness (being able to know what you do not know), collaboration and team working, enquiry skills (being able to ask the right questions), the ability to be able to look at problems, see opportunities, solve the problems creatively and have informed attitudes to risk.
Gerard Darby, Future Innovators Manager at NESTA, states: “I believe these skills and attitudes are things that can be integrated into all subject areas; in some subject areas there is greater opportunity, but with imagination and a bit of thought they can be inculcated into all areas. The fact is, if you do integrate these into subject areas, young people tend to be much more motivated about what they’re learning and they realise there are other things they are learning other than just facts and information, such as what to do with that information and those facts.”
Yet he continues: “The current education system does not encourage innovative skills enough. These are also the skills and attributes that employers are asking for.”
In its report out last year, ‘Working Progress: How to reconnect young people and organisations’, thinktank Demos looked at what skills employers demand for the future. In a GfK NOP survey carried out on behalf of Demos, FTSE 200 human resource directors were asked what they think will be the most important skill, quality or aptitude in 10 years’ time for graduates. Creativity and innovation came at the top of the list with 24%, followed by flexibility and multitasking (20%), communication and communication of ideas (18%), and problem solving (10%).
On what they look for today, the HR directors said communication and communication of ideas was the most important (68%), then problem solving (40%), team work (36%), and creativity and innovation (28%). This transition outlines the thought of The Cox Review of Creativity in Business, delivered to the Chancellor in 2005. The report said the UK has a window of opportunity only five to ten years’ wide in which to develop the creative skills needed to compete in the future global economy.
Demos also says that some companies are already leaping ahead to innovative thought. One is The Eden Project. Managing director, Tim Smit, said to his employees the day before the Project’s launch, that they were going to be asked by the public to do things that they had not been trained for. According to Demos, he added: “If you respond in a way in which things go wrong, we will not blame you. If you do nothing, I’ll fire you.”
Future Innovators, which was spawned from a former project at NESTA, the Learning Programme, is working with teachers and policy makers to establish projects that will actively bring innovative abilities and outlooks to young people. The project launched in April 2007, kicking off with a Call for Ideas on understanding risk. Original, untested ideas to establish this skill in youngsters will be chosen from applicants entries, and the best will receive funding of £10,000 to £60,000 each to launch as pilots in September 2007.
Yet Darby states that it is not only a wad of cash that will be handed out to the best new ideas in this and future Call for Ideas. Pilot projects will also benefit from NESTA’s experience, access to its networks, partners and other projects it has invested in and learnt from. The end game is to generate learning to inform that project further, or to feed into another project, and to create a successful pilot that other formal and informal educational establishments will hear about and roll out.
One project funded through the Future Innovators’ predecessor, the Learning Programme, is Room 13, which has created the kind of success and radical learning that NESTA hopes to replicate. Room 13 started off at Caol Primary School, Fort William, Scotland, in 1994. Young people were given responsibility to run their own art studio. It has since grown organically into a network of student-run art, music and multimedia studios in schools across the UK. Students have to work alongside a professional artist in residence, whom they engage and manage. As well as artistic and creative talents, the students learn to be innovative and entrepreneurial.
The environment in which young people can learn new skills is also an area that NESTA wishes people to consider through Future Innovators. An example of that is Bolton Technical Innovation Centre, a junior incubator, which provides a completely different environment from that of a traditional school, where students can learn about and use the latest technologies. Also funded through NESTA’s Learning Programme, it is designed to be a place of inspiration; students aged 9 to 19 can use technology above and beyond that found in schools to design and make things, find links between technology, art and science, and become scientists, engineers and technologists.
As well as the Call for Ideas pilots, Future Innovators is looking for individual ideas. The first to launch is the Lowestoft Energy Challenge, for which Future Innovators is testing the model with partner, Enterprise Insight. Lowestoft is an area of significant regeneration, and young people in three schools are being asked to develop enterprising solutions to the climate and sustainability challenge. The primary school, secondary school and college involved will have enterprise training so students understand about climate change, then develop possible solutions, and then may apply for seed finding to get the projects going, from a total fund of £100,000. One result of the project will be to create a toolkit showing teachers how to replicate the project.
Darby adds: “What we’re not about is funding something that is already happening. We want new ways of getting young people to collaborate and listen.”