Work in Progress: Mind and Skill Sets for Innovation: Preparation for a Rapidly Changing World

How innovative are you? High levels of innovativeness are correlated with high-value creation, and today's rapid pace of change requires new skills for lifelong learning, curiosity, innovation, and continuous improvement. To what level can personal innovativeness be improved through curricular innovations and how do we improve students' practical skills for ongoing discovery? Innovation Mind and Skill Sets for Design and Research is a new course that focuses on providing STEM students the broader mind and skill sets that will help them connect their specialized work to the larger system and the society it impacts and effectively experiment, discover, and create value in the highly dynamic and uncertain environment of breakthrough innovation. This paper will discuss the development of the course which Hipwell based on both innovation literature and her own two decades of experience applying and improving innovation business processes with her teams in a fast-paced, high-tech industry. An educational class structure and learning outcomes are developed based upon the theory that innovation is itself a learning process and can be improved through the known learning science concepts of improvement of student metacognition about their innovation process and incorporation of intention and reflection in their learning cycles. Further, the model incorporates literature on teaching system thinking and Transformative Learning Theory for adults. Content is developed that teaches the students practical techniques that scaffold their innovation process and increase their metacognition. Movement up levels of Bloom's Taxonomy and long-term habits are developed through the practice of the innovation process in a team project with expert feedback from an experienced innovation practitioner. Learning is increased through reflection on the process during class presentations. Measurement of student improvement results compared to control design curricula using the Innovator Mindset® Assessment is also discussed.