Project Aims

The Creating Innovators research project aims to investigate how higher and vocational education can drive Australia’s national innovation agenda through the development of innovative career capabilities in their students.

Within the overarching aim just described, the research has the following specific objectives:

1. To build and test a theory regarding the development of individual capabilities that lead to the generation and implementation of innovative ideas, which have the following hallmarks: (i) successful implementation (ii) valuable (iii) creative (Amabile et al, 1996)

2. To identify which of these individual capabilities represent opportunities for inclusion in higher and professional education programs, and to make suggestions regarding how this inclusion can best be achieved.

Project Phases

Creating Innovators is a three year project, comprising three phases of research.It commenced in April 2009. The three phases are:

Phase 1: Theory building using in-depth interviews and an analytical induction approach

Phase 2: Theory validation using self-report surveys and a large scale quantitative approach

Phase 3: Innovation capabilities education and training program gap analysis