C
TRUIDA PREKEL AND LU-MARIE SOBEY SOWING SEEDS FOR INNOVATION AT UNIVERSITIES
reativity and innovation are important worldwide to promote new knowledge, develop improved solutions, and create economic and social
wealth.
Although universities can play a major role in promoting innovation, this potential contribution is not always realised.
Active efforts to increase
awareness of this role and to develop innovation skills at universities can make a huge impact on our societies. In this paper we give an overview of initiatives at three universities where faculty, students and staff were exposed to a practical approach to creativity and innovation: Stellenbosch University and the University of the Western Cape, both near Cape Town, and the University of Applied Sciences in Muenster, Germany. We see the ground rules and tools shared with hundreds of participants as seeds that could germinate to grow many new ideas.
Universities contribute to innovation in various ways, including: • Research leading to new knowledge, new products, scientific breakthroughs and novel approaches in many fields;
• Collaboration between academics in various disciplines leading to new insights and applications – breakthroughs often occur on the interfaces between disciplines; • Innovative teaching utilising new technologies that actively involve, and meet the needs and expectations of students who have grown up in the digital world; • Equipping students with practical innovation skills to use in their studies, in their future careers and in their personal lives; • Collaborating with business and government (the so-called ‘triple helix’) to ensure that knowledge, the sciences, funding and planning are effectively co-
The Innovation Journal
Figure 1: Decrease in Creative thinking ability with age. Land and Jarman (1993)
ordinated to achieve maximum synergies to address challenges facing communities, countries and the world in innovative and productive ways.
Despite the huge potential for innovation at universities, such activities are often inhibited by insistence on ‘proven approaches’, caution, convention, tradition, convenience and habit – and in some cases by status, power-plays, territory, or reluctance to share ‘intellectual property’. The classical George Land and Beth Jarman (1993) study showed that people’s creative capacity reduces dramatically as they grow older. In a longitudinal study using eight tests for divergent thinking, they found that while 98% of 3-to-5-year-olds were highly creative, it reduced over the years to 35% among 8-to- 10-year-olds, 10% of teenagers and only 2% of adults. See Figure 1. Therefore we believe we should ‘catch them young’, and try to reverse this downward trend by re-stimulating or ‘re-seeding’ creativity among faculty, staff and students at universities.
September 2012 | Management Today 79
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