Abstract:

The conventional approaches to the organization and management are not sufficient to fully examine the potential impact of emerging technologies on schools and design necessary innovation processes in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in schools. Such innovation, especially digital ones, require the involvement of many stakeholders inside and outside the school, including teachers, managers, pupils, technology providers, policymakers, social organizations, researchers, academic institutions and common citizens.

Thus, the purpose of this paper is to create a conceptual framework to describe, explain and design digital living labs based on value co-creating paradigm as a proposition that enable to co-design such innovations to reinvent a school.

The discussion undertaken in the paper is mainly theoretical and methodological. It is based on the process of reasoning that is the closest to problematization described by Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) as challenging the assumptions and constraints of existing theories. In such a perspective, the reasoning process itself is mostly implicit and thus difficult to explicitly present in the form of a systematic methodological approach.

The discussion undertaken in the paper is primarily based on the method of the analysis and criticism of literature. However, due to the methodological perspective adopted in the paper, the literature search is also rather implicit. Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) call it a path-defining study (based rather on a more narrow literature coverage and in-depth readings of key texts identifying and challenging the critical assumptions). Therefore, the literature search is concentrated on those literature positions, which are the source of the assumptions and constraints the most important for the aim of the reasoning process.

The study is extended with the initial empirical research of teachers' readiness to get involved in creating such innovation (using questionnaire interviews).

Changing social practices requires the development of a new consensus, a common paradigm of practice - not only at the discursive level, but at the level of shared values and co-created solutions that are being developed in everyday practices. Consequently, traditional methods based on top-down management logic (with the central role of top level managers) are not sufficient. Thus, the main result is the proposition of the conceptual framework for a platform mediating common practices to co-create school innovations (inspired by design driven living labs). Living labs are defined as long term environments for open innovation that enable experimentation with real users in real contexts (Følstad 2008; Leminen et al. 2012).

Keywords:

Innovation, school, living labs, co-design, education management.