Fostering Innovation In Students Through Education

An effort to build an Innovation Quotient can help students develop valuable skills such as creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration. These skills are crucial for success in today’s rapidly changing job market and can prepare students for careers in a variety of fields. Additionally, this can encourage students to be proactive and take initiative, which can lead to positive personal and professional growth. Overall, providing students with innovation training and opportunities can help them become well-rounded, adaptive individuals who are prepared to tackle the challenges of the future.

Students can be taught to be innovative thinkers through a combination of educational methods, including:

1. Problem-based learning: Encouraging students to identify and solve real-world problems can foster their critical thinking and creativity skills. The innovation ecosystem that has developed in this regard has always fascinated me. Nobel laureate Professor Ada Yonath had an extremely interesting take on this. The key lies in developing a sense of curiosity amongst the students right from their primitive years.
2. Design thinking: Teaching the design thinking process, which involves empathising with users, defining a problem, prototyping solutions, and testing, can help students approach problems with a creative and iterative mindset. Normally in our Indian system of education, we are taught to only test based on the curriculum and within the scope of the subject. However, in Israel, students are provided a statement and asked to develop questions regarding the statement. The most innovative questions would receive the highest marks. This creates a mindset of thinking and innovation.
3. Collaboration: Group projects and activities can encourage students to work together, share ideas, and learn from one another. The Start-up for Research in Operational Technologies (SROT) was inaugurated in collaboration with Vishwakarma Incubation and Innovation Research (VIIR) at Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology on the 27th of January, 2023. The aim of the initiative is to promote and establish a start-up culture for students at the institute. Here again, the Personnel from the Defence realize that they are not capable of bringing about creative solutions to their problem statements. Young students – through proper mentoring – can deliver out of the box ideas for complex problems. SROT is an incubator of the Defence Forces and would nurture startups to develop innovative solutions for them.
4. Encouragement of risk-taking: A supportive environment that encourages students to experiment and take risks can help them become comfortable with uncertainty and foster their innovative thinking skills. The students at various institutions under the Vishwakarma umbrella are encouraged through various workshops to undertake the gambit of innovation.
5. Exposure to diverse perspectives: Diverse perspectives can help students challenge their assumptions and consider new ideas and solutions. I attended an event of Intelligence Plus – an organisation working in the domain of developing an entrepreneurship mindset amongst school children. I observed that young children have enough ideas to solve our societal and new age problems.
6. Interdisciplinary learning: Integrating subjects and encouraging students to apply their learning to real-world scenarios can help them develop a more holistic and creative approach to problem-solving. The mantel to innovate and change our thinking lies with young minds. Senior industrialists are now in agreement with this ethos and turn to the younger generation for out-of-the-box solutions to age-old problems.
7. Hands-on experience: Providing students with hands-on experiences, such as maker spaces, can help them develop their creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. As a leader of an educational institute, this is currently at the top of my agenda. I understand that students can only be taught innovative thinking by learning hands-on and by making different perspectives available to them.

Thus, teaching students to be innovative thinkers involves a combination of experiential learning, encouragement, and exposure to diverse perspectives and ideas.