Educate to Innovate: Factors That Influence Innovation: Based on Input from Innovators and Stakeholders (2015)

Appendix E
OTHER INFORMATION DESIRED FROM THE INTERVIEW ANALYSIS

The workshop participants were asked what more they would like to learn from the interview analysis. The following notes may suggest directions for future research in this area and would inform the next phase of the project that focuses on understanding how to build environments for educating to innovate.

• What were the innovators’ views on how to actually teach innovation?
• What about the licensing model? It doesn’t create growth development or job creation.
• Have a forum to hear the long version of President Mote’s talk.
• At what time in people’s lives do they become innovators?
• What are very specific examples of experiences that made them innovators?
• What impeded their becoming an innovator? (It seems as though many became innovators in spite of their education.)
• Provide information about experiences when a teacher rewarded or appreciated their giving an answer or explanation that was different from what the teacher expected. Then look at the variety of their examples and infer what teachers do that models innovative thinking.
• Look at when people had experiences to play and explore without a predetermined outcome. When did you hear that the process was valued, not just the outcome?
• How did people learn through their failures?
• Balance teaching the fundamentals with processing and manipulation time.
• For the categories (skills, experience, environments), how did each affect their process for innovating?
• Why did classmates fall to the wayside and they themselves bloomed?
• What cultures are the most fruitful for innovation, for learning to learn? What learning experiences had the most impact?
• Ask them to watch or listen to other innovators’ interviews or transcripts. What two or three things, as you listen to the other innovator(s), ring true?

• Are there patterns in upbringing, parents, living arrangements, and the role of noncurricular activities in students’ lives?
• Add “culture” as a category. A participant says she would not be as successful as an entrepreneur if she were working in another company environment; the specific culture is important, she says.
• What is the significance of individual actions and experiences as distinct from group experiences? How did each of these settings figure into different parts of their development?
• How did they break paradigms? How were they iconoclastic?
• How did they feel among their peers socially? Did they perceive themselves to be popular? Test the hypothesis that the really popular people may not be the iconoclasts, innovators, or future entrepreneurs.