Abstract:

Purpose:
Our globe is facing challenges of economic, sustainable and human character. A need for more creative and solution-oriented thinking is required – both for our politicians and institutions, but more importantly for our future minds - students. They are inevitably our future change agents and need to be well prepared for the challenges to come. Ways of embracing our future are to stimulate a mind set towards open innovation, creativity and make co-creation the preferred way to evolve. By being better at listening and using each other’s precious insights and know how/who, challenges can be turned into opportunities.

This project is an example of how a modern institution can co-create new educational material and tools together with ambitious students, whom wish to make a difference and create change through the educational system.

In January 2014, Copenhagen School of Design and Technology (KEA) asked two master students, studying innovation and entrepreneurship at Copenhagen Business School, to give input to their KEA Innovation Week in May 2014. The two students ended up creating a tangible product consisting of a learning tool; a Innovation Kit®, which was tested and used throughout the week by students and teachers. Both teachers and students at KEA experienced how Innovation Kit® enabled them to think about their surroundings in a new way, identify a challenge and come up with a solution, which then was prototyped and presented to the rest of the class. Some of the solutions even got implemented as a result of Innovation Kit®.

Innovation Kit® in details:
The digital era, we live in, creates great opportunities for knowledge sharing and online education. However a result of this is though a decreased focus on the physical and practical elements of learning, which Innovation Kit® is trying to accommodate. Based on the knowledge and experience from the two students educational background, Innovation Kit® is developed to consist of three phases; a phase of problem identification, an ideation phase and a phase of prototyping and presenting. The use of the Innovation Kit ® demands no preparation for the teachers, but takes the students and the teachers through a creative and alternative experience of innovation. By going through such a process the students got the chance to experience how a challenge can be viewed as an opportunity and solved through creative and innovative thinking.

What change can we create?
Innovation Kit® is just one example of how students can take action and create tools for other students and thereby contribute to a more sustainable, healthier and exciting future in the field of education. Ambitious and engaged students can be found all over the globe – a great facilitation of this huge potential is often needed in order to turn them into real change agents. The practical and independent learning tool, Innovation Kit® is the first step towards this goal. We hope you will join us and give us the honour to speak at ICERI2014, so we can share our thoughts and hopefully inspire others to help us create the future, which we believe starts with the youth.

Keywords:

Open innovation, gaming, innovative thinking, fun learning.