Rethinking Innovation Teaching - The Innovation Week Format

Today’s business world is highly dynamic, competitive and hardly predictable. Staying innovative is a crucial necessity for organisational success and the need for employing the right people having appropriate skills and mindsets is a key success factor. From an educational point of view, this poses the challenge to develop and implement new forms of teaching and training aligned with these changed qualification profiles. The underlying research question of this paper is as follows: How does an innovation-teaching format have to be designed to convey the skills needed in future innovation management and to enable students to actively engage in creative, customer-centric and real-world problem solving tasks? To address this issue, the paper introduces the Innovation Week teaching format and the positive results of its successful application during the last 6 years and with more than 480 students and 80 company problems at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria.