There is passion behind any innovation. But, unless you are a multibillionaire playing to innovate just for hobby -without further consequences- no innovative venture should be decided “gut instinct”, despite the environment you are working on. Education environment is not an exception of course.
For education institutions, as well as for business, innovating has become a key strategy for being competitive. The problem is that individuals as well as institutions often make the mistake of thinking that:
A) a good idea is enough to innovate
B) innovation can be done during “free-time” or between production and operations workload without any systematization.
While the first assumption can be the cause of innovation, the second assumption is a very big mistake; innovation requires time, effort, budget, talent, frameworks and a lot of data analysis in order to be effective and efficient.
During the last four years I had the opportunity to collaborate with one of the most prestigious private higher education institution in Mexico (Mexico’s #1, LATAM’s #5, World’s #29 according to the 2020, TOP 200 QS World University Rankings), first as head of the Instructional Design team, inside the content factory of the Learning Innovation Office, and then, as founder and leader of the Research-based innovation centre for learning innovation and continuous improvement for the Learning Innovation Vice-chancellor´s Office.
This work presents:
1) the needs that motivate me to seek the creation of a team specialized in research to support the decision making behind learning innovations for the institution,
2) the challenges faced to convince directors and boards of its relevance,
3) the team characteristics for this centre,
4) the framewor and methodologies used,
5) some of the most relevant researches done,
6) lessons learned from the first year and
7) the future for this kind of research-based innovation centre and why it is relevant for any kind of institution interested in consolidating the learning innovation processes.
In a nutshell, the principal motive to promote this centre was the need to take innovation out of the “I think/feel” sphere and bring it to the data-based one by providing the required information to determine each project viability, opportunity and convenience.
Perhaps the big challenges were the usual resistance to change, the uncertainty of what is new and of course the strong gravitational force caused by the production and operation work-flow. Finally, after two years of gathering evidence of the importance of integrating research and data-analysis to boost innovation ventures and convince the decision-makers to support and invest, while making a more efficient use of talent and time when designing new learning solutions, the research-based innovation centre was approved, with a small but very talented team of 5 people.
From the beginning, the design of the team was intended to be as multidisciplinary and horizontal as possible, and together with our framework based on the design-based research methodology, it proved to be the right decision in order to generate reliable and opportune information that fuels the iterative macro-process of learning innovation and continuous improvement.
The centre started with interesting EdTech projects related the institution’s program to rethink their entire core educational model. Many lessons had been learned and the future for this type of efforts proved to be not just promising, but essential.
