Abstract:

Innovation competences are seen as the most wanted qualities of employees of today and the future. These competences are often defined as ability to be creative, ability to collaboratively develop ideas and ability to learn. According to recent studies, it’s quite obvious that these kinds of competences can’t be taught only in classroom. Innovation and learning processes include a lot of similarities. For example both processes include phases of ideating, testing and redeveloping. In some context they are even seen as the same. The crucial question from the perspective of education is how can we teach these innovation competences? How can we teach students to learn?

The objective of this presentation is to present one example to promote student´s innovation competences. The case-study is virtual platform called INNOBANK (www.innopankki.fi). It is developed in ESF -funded project KINOS, which aim was to develop educational organizations´ innovation competences in Mikkeli area, Finland. INNOBANK was one important result of secondary and high level educational organizations’ collaboration.

INNOBANK allows students - and other users - to submit their own ideas to the site. These ideas, seeds of innovation, can be liked (ie Facebook) and commented by other users. The idea of commenting is to iterate the first idea into something even bigger and doable. As the platform is open for all, any educational institute or corporation can participate in this process. Usage of the site doesn't require registration. Service was launched in November 2013. So far there are 59 innovations, 191 comments and thousands of likes. At the moment more than four ideas have been put into practice. INNOBANK is strongly linked to education. The ideas are developed into a practice as a part of studies. It functions as a platform of collaboration between education and working-life. The purpose is that there are movement in both ways; from working-life to education and vice versa. INNOBANK is a tool where students are encouraged to collaborate with each other's, educational institutes and working-life.

As a conclusion can be said that the working-life of today and the future requires competences which can’t be taught only in traditional way. This challenges especially educational organizations to redesign their activities. We are challenged to find new ways to collaborate and to learn. Open innovation platforms, as INNOBANK, can be seen as one tool in this changing paradigm of education.

Keywords:

Collaborative learning, innovation, virtual platform.