Learning to innovate: How to foster innovation competence in students of built environment at universities of applied sciences

Developing students’ innovation competence is becoming increasingly important in higher education, yet few studies have investigated whether current learning environments are aimed at promoting this competence and whether students perceive themselves to have mastered this competence. This study aimed at mapping students’ perceptions of the learning environment as far as the extent to which their schools’ curricula were directed towards developing innovation competence and their perceptions of their own innovation competence. A survey was created and administered to 130 students of Built Environment programs at eight universities of applied sciences (UAS) in the Netherlands. Students perceived there to be a supportive learning environment for innovation competence only to a limited degree. On the other hand, students rated their own innovation competence moderately high. Despite positive perceptions of students’ own innovation competence, the results indicated that the learning environment was only to a limited degree aimed at developing innovation competence. The results suggest that universities may need to focus more explicitly and structurally on the teaching and assessment of innovation competence. The Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Sciences (Vereniging van Hogescholen; VH) recognizes the need to ensure that graduates acquire the innovation competence required in the (future) labour market. In 2015, the VH emphasized the need to explicitly develop students’ innovation competence in the domain of Built Environments, and since then, many Built Environments courses or programmes have strived to explicitly teach innovation competence. Although the VH emphasized the importance of developing students’ innovation competence, it did not indicate how programs could incorporate this competence into the curriculum. Furthermore, this innovation competence was not further defined or described, and what learning activities teachers could organize or how this competence could be assessed was not described either. Innovation competence consists of complex skills, knowledge and attitudes that are related to each other. Much literature in this area mainly focused on creativity as a personality trait. In general, policy documents often do not explicitly describe what innovation competence is, leaving (too) much room for individual interpretation, which leads to confusion in study programmes and with the teachers involved. Frameworks for learning and teaching activities to promote innovation competence are limited. Innovation competence is defined in this thesis as the competence to systematically discover shortcomings in a context/situation, to formulate innovative questions, generate creative ideas for products, services, procedures and theories, to demonstrate the usefulness or significance of a solution through reflection and to demonstrate that the generated solutions can be successfully implemented. It is at present unknown whether current curricula in higher education indeed aim at developing innovation competence and, if so, to what extent. One way to find out is by mapping the views and perceptions of teachers and students about their learning environments as innovation-supportive. Since views on learning environments generally differ, the extent to which the views of teachers and students about their learning environments as innovation-supporting correspond and whether their current learning environment indeed offers sufficient support for the development of innovation competence are issues open to question.