Overview
Project status: In progress
Creating innovators promotes Australia's innovation culture and economy by maximizing our creative and technological capability.
It also positions higher education squarely within Australia's National Innovation Systems agenda by asking how universities contribute to the development of innovation capabilities currently, and how they might do so more effectively in the future.
In addition, the project is an opportunity to explore and quantify individual experiences of innovation development and deployment in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) professionals and Creative Industries professionals. Although 'the arts' and 'the sciences' have traditionally been viewed as polar opposites in sector skill composition terms, workers in these innovation-intensive industries may have more in common than previously acknowledged.
- Grantor
-
QUT Vice-Chancellor's Fellowship
- Research leader
- Organisational unit
- Lead unit Creative Industries Faculty
- Start date
- 1st January 2009
- End date
- 1st January 2012
- Research area
- Digital media, communication and culture
- Keywords
- innovation, STEM, creative industries
Dr Ruth BridgstockDetails
Creating innovators is Ruth Bridgstock's QUT Vice-Chancellor's Fellowship project. The project develops and tests a comprehensive theory of the growth and deployment of 'innovation capabilities' in individuals. It commences with a qualitative study of the career development of outstanding early career innovators in the creative industries and science/technology fields.
The theory generated by the qualitative study will then be tested using large-scale quantitative surveys of professionals working within key innovation sectors. A gap analysis of graduate capabilities in university courses will then pave the way for the creation of education programs aimed at the growth of individual innovation capabilities.
Project description
The initial phase of research is now underway. This phase involves in-depth interviews with outstanding Australian early-to-mid career innovators. These interviews explore some of the formative individual, contextual, and social factors which have been influential in the innovators' careers to date.
Publications and output
The findings will be used to enhance and augment higher education courses in the creative industries field. Findings from phase 1 of the research will also be disseminated in 2010 via an authored book.
