Abstract:

The importance of the makers’ projects at the universities has significantly increases because they open new dimension in innovation and technological development. By involving in different makers’ projects the university students as well as the researchers and academics have participated in actively a wide variety of information, which accelerate them in creativity, innovation, patenting, and licensing.

In this study, the effects of makers’ projects on accelerating creativity, innovation, patenting, and licensing were critically studied. Furthermore, how empathy had been affected the participants in creating innovative products, services, and processes by involving actively in learning process. Since in the makers’ projects informal and non-formal learning had been much more effective than formal learning, the participants’ creativity and collaboration had markedly increased. In that way, the patenting and licensing oriented innovation had deeply and intensively improved comparing to other ecosystems, particularly those, which were related to formal learning in which individual competitions were extremely high.

In order to analyze the effects of the makers’ projects on accelerating creativity, innovation, patenting and licensing, the phenomenological interpretive analysis is used to investigate this new interactive ecosystem. Mainly the graduate level students (43), the experienced researchers (12) and academics (4) had attended from two state and three private universities in order to the study their behaviors and attitudes while taking into account their perception regarding to the effects of the makers’ projects environment. By using the phenomenological analysis, twenty-six research questions were answered in the semi-structured interactive interviews by the target participants, who were from engineering departments, medical school, and basic sciences. The collected data were analyzed in data analysis software-program NVivo 10.

As a result, the data showed clearly that most of the participants (81%), who were played important roles in makers’ projects, had significantly better results in creativity, innovation and technology oriented projects. Furthermore, most of the makers’ project had developed better cooperative and collaborative ecosystems for most of the participants (97%) who created easily new products and services which had the potential of patenting and licensing. More importantly, the results had clearly showed that, those who were more involved in the makers’ projects in a team they had much more empathy in understanding the needs of the industries and those who need help. As most of the participants (93%) agreed that the makers’ projects had significantly accelerate open innovation since informal and non-formal learning develops new values, particularly transparency, trustworthiness, ethics, empathy, self control team capabilities, responsibilities, accountability, and resiliency. Additionally, since they had realized the needs of the market and final users, their divergent thinking opened new dimensions in the makers’ projects in which most of the outcomes had seen as licensing patents. In conclusion, the makers’ projects helped the participants to change their behaviors and attitudes of the participants’ teamwork capacity in redesigning and testing innovative products and services due to the fact that they gained empathy and resiliency as new values.

Keywords:

Makers Projects, University, Acceleratation, Creativity, Innovation, Licensing, Patents, Informal And Non-formal Learning, Empathy, Resiliency.