CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND EMPLOYABILITY IN SCIENCE MASTERS: HOW TO HELP REVITALIZE SEVERELY DEPOPULATED AREAS THROUGH THEIR BIODIVERSITY

A priority line of action of Spanish universities is to help generate quality employment by promoting the employability of their master students. However, a recent report by the University Employability and Employment Observatory of Spain has found deficiencies in the promotion of initiative, innovation and creativity skills, especially in the area of sciences. These deficiencies would help explain, at least in part, why the percentage of master graduates who are self-employed in Spain is so low.

The University of Valencia (UV) has a specific training program, MOTIVEM, whose objective is to stimulate students’ creativity by creating teams, coordinated by trained teachers, who present innovative ideas to compete for a prize at university level in several professional fields, including sciences. These ideas are presented in a short, compelling format (including a 1-min video), and are devised to both improve specific socioeconomic areas and, hopefully, become the germ of potential future jobs for the participants. In MOTIVEM, the connection with employment is also provided through an additional training action for the participating students, called “Professional Project”, which seeks to transform a MOTIVEM idea into a job project, thereby facilitating employability.

In this presentation we describe how a MOTIVEM-like format could be used to fostering entrepreneurial skills (innovation, creativity) in students of the “Master in Biodiversity: Conservation and Evolution”. We selected a ‘hot topic’, i.e., the mitigation of rural exodus, which is one of the most important problems of territorial structuring of our country, and proposed student to treat biodiversity as a resource to revitalize severely depopulated areas in novel ways. Beyond conventional rural tourism, biodiversity may play a significant role in promoting novel forms of responsible ecotourism and environmental education. Fresh and innovative ideas could diversify employment and increase entrepreneurship opportunities, thus generating added value and local economic development. In this presentation we will show some of the ideas proposed by student teams. The whole scheme could easily be transferred to other science masters where entrepreneurship skills are to be developed.