Abstract:

This paper highlights a methodology to detect the most relevant behaviours and skills to be included in assessment innovation competence of higher education students. The innovation competency can be considered as a cluster of different capacities and skills. Innovation is a complex process that comprises several competencies, such as, perception of opportunities, ideas generation and evaluation, action plans, cooperation and risk. It is one of the most competitive advantage in determining the success or failure of a company in the global market.
The Innovation Competencies Development (INCODE) Barometer is a scoring tool develop in the INCODE project to assess innovation competence. The main purpose of INCODE Project was design and validate a measuring questionnaire.

The development of IBC Barometer started with the definition of the skills or competencies to be included and the indicators to measure each skill, following by the creation of the assessment rubric. The initial proposal presented by UPV, included the five most important capacities considered by the Project Management Committee to be contained in innovation competence (creativity, initiative and leadership, forward thinking, communication and team work) and 25 items to measure them. After discussion among the partners the IBC Barometer was changed to contemplate only the innovation competencies contemplated by TUAS follow the European Qualifications Framework, according the proposed model, by Pennttilä and Kairisto-Mertanene (2012): individual, teamwork and networking competencies.

The purpose of our study is to evaluate the underlying factor structure of the INCODE Baromerv6. Although different qualitative and quantitative analysis have been developing to validate the instrument, all of them have only tested the validity and reliability of a second-order model. Nevertheless, none of them has develop the logic sequence of analysis for developing and validating measurement scales. It is required first, test the measurement model (first order) or even evaluated whether the innovation competence has got one dimension or several, and what the conceptual definition of innovation competence will be.

To check the psychometric properties and the dimensions of the model underlying the INCODE Barometer-v6, we began trying their reliability and validity. Then, to analyse the underlying pattern of the questionnaire, an exploratory and confirmatory factorial analysis was develop to verify different hypothesis or models. The total sample was constituted by 1546 students of a Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) from a Spanish public university, who will complete on-line version of the questionnaire (INCODE-ICB-v6) in the academic year 2014-2015.

Results shown that the psychometric properties and the dimensions IBC Barometer-v6 are acceptable. This work provides a contribution to researches in the fields of innovation as it fills the gap in literature by providing a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the degree of innovation of students. Furthermore, we provide an explicit specification of the measurement model at the design stage of the questionnaire, a stage frequently overlooked in articles published on validating measurement instruments.

Keywords:

Innovation competency, Multivariate analysis, INCODE questionnaire, Validation, Higher Education, Structural Equation Model.