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This paper seeks to heighten and expand understanding of the important role of business education and scholarship in innovation, and consequentially on how this innovation enables business schools to contribute to economic growth and prosperity.

While the foundation of this paper is a new report on the role of business schools in innovation issued by AACSB International, this paper extends the results by integrating more recent studies and reports on innovation.

The report concludes that management and leadership are essential aspects of the innovation lifecycle, and that business schools play a significant role in developing the cadre of individuals with these skill sets.

This paper draws on and synthesizes the most recent literature on innovation, as well as relating innovation to issues of economic development and prosperity. In doing this, it calls for business schools to proactively define their unique contributions to innovate and to become advocates for the significance of management and leadership in competitive success.

The inherit complexity of an educational system further complicates the challenge of introducing technology-based educational initiatives into a school environment. Once introduced, the initiative has the potential to become self-sustaining or to cease once the term is over. Such uncertainty makes the use of expensive information technology (IT) in schools “risky business,” which requires school leaders go above and beyond their current routine to extend the system's capacity to sustain the innovation. A discretionary behavior of school leaders and teachers is one of key factors that contribute to or prevent the sustainability of an innovation. A lack of understanding of what encourages an individual's discretionary behavior and how discretion is fostered in school practices contribute to the challenge of innovation's sustainability. If the individuals’ discretion is required to sustain a technology-based educational program within a school, do their actions dwell outside or inside of the school environment? More importantly, how does a discretionary chain of command operate and can it be aligned? In this chapter we use an “ecological model” approach to describe the influential factors, which affect project's sustainability by transforming effective discretionary approaches of school leaders and teachers from policy to practice. We draw our description of the model on the results of the empirical study of Hong Kong schools involved in the design and strategic IT implementation of the e-Leadership Enhancement Project (eLEP).

Change is constant in schools. Educational fads come and go while many believe that schools of today have changed little over the last hundred years. Enter information and communication technology (ICT). Is it just another fad that will pass? Is it window dressing for schools that are fundamentally the same? A quick “yes” to these questions fails to understand the nature of ICT, the nature of schools, and the nature of innovation in schools. This chapter explores models of innovation to help schools understand the change process and how to use models of change to support innovation with ICT.

Due to the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, primary and secondary schools worldwide are deploying online teaching/learning practices, fostering and thus innovation practices. The purpose of this study is to determine the degree to which practices reflecting educational innovation are implemented in the Greek public primary and secondary schools operating under conditions characterized by the COVID-19 pandemic. Determining the relationship among these educational innovation practices is also an aim of the present study.

A research study was conducted in the Greek public primary and secondary schools. 522 teachers fully completed a structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were applied to analyze the data.

The findings reveal that administration-related innovation practices, teaching-related innovation practices and online teaching/learning practices are implemented to some extent in primary and secondary schools in Greece, but there is still scope for continued development. The online teaching/learning practices set the foundations for further developing a culture of fully adopting other educational innovation practices in these schools to improve education.

Limited research concerning educational innovation practices has focused on primary and secondary schools. The need for more studies on teaching and learning innovations that have resulted from the COVID-19 crisis is highlighted by the literature. The results of this study support the fact that online teaching/learning implemented in primary and secondary schools is positively associated with administration-related and teaching-related innovation practices, concluding that this forced change in the educational process can act as a catalyst for more changes and innovative actions.

Schools struggle with sustaining their educational innovations (Cohen and Mehta, 2017; Askell-Williams and Koh, 2020) and may benefit from concrete and practical guidance (Askell-Williams and Koh, 2020). A dialogue between staff within schools can be a way to promote self-evaluation regarding the innovation. Therefore, a self-evaluation tool for educators was developed: The Sustainability Meter (TSM). The purpose of the tool is to gain insight into the different perspectives and experiences of stakeholders within the school organization regarding the innovation, as a basis for improvement-directed actions to promote sustainable educational innovation.

In this small-scale study, the authors explored conceptual and instrumental use of the Sustainability Meter in two phases, and also examined user satisfaction. In phase 1, the tool was used under the guidance of the researcher (first author), who supported the chairs in taking steps before the group dialogue took place, and who then guided the dialogue itself as a moderator. In phase 2, work with TSM was organized independently by the schools themselves, supported by the manual. Data were collected in the form of observations of the dialogue, group interviews and documents generated by the participants.

In terms of conceptual use, in general, participants gained better understanding of each other's perspectives and backgrounds with regard to the (sustainability of the) innovation. The dialogue also led to insights into challenges for growth toward sustainable innovation. For instrumental use, the results of the analysis were incorporated in a plan of action in the majority of the participants' schools. In terms of user satisfaction, participants in all groups perceived TSM as an enjoyable support for high-quality dialogue. This research provides some indications that the tool might lead to sustainable educational innovations.

Next to developing an action plan based on the results of the school, the tool also appeared to help breaking up the process in smaller, clearer and more feasible improvement-directed actions. The results of this study further show that the authors could distinguish between three types of instrumental use. The improvement-directed actions in this research often were a combination of this three types: initial solutions, short-term and longer-term measures. This research provides some indications that the tool might lead to sustainable educational innovations.

In organisational and innovation research, the term “open innovation” refers to the inflow and outflow of knowledge to and from organisations: with open innovation theory suggesting active exchanges of knowledge with external actors leads to the development of exploitable new ideas. In the field of education, however, the exchange of knowledge with external parties represents a paradigm shift. In response, this article presents findings from research design to explore the nature and composition of school innovation networks, and the effects of such these networks on knowledge mobilisation.

The study draws on data from a representative random sample of 411 German school leaders. Respondents were asked to detail their engagement in open and closed innovation activity and their school's external collaborations during the last 12 months. A latent class distal outcome model was developed to examine whether different types of collaboration associate with different knowledge mobilisation processes.

The study findings suggest that schools in Germany mainly use internal knowledge for innovation, with external knowledge exchange taking place on a very limited basis. Knowledge mobilisation varies depending on the innovation network. The authors use the findings to indicate new insights for how schools can further innovate learning and teaching in future.

Although there is increasing discussion on Professional Learning Networks in schools, the discourse on knowledge mobilisation within educational networks is limited, making concept of open innovation so far completely absent from discourses on school improvement. This paper initiates the population of this new research space.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of collective teacher efficacy, academic press and faculty trust, all of which are components of academic optimism (AO), in predicting school innovation. In addition, the authors explored the extent to which faculty trust mediates the association between collective teacher efficacy and academic press with school innovation.

In all, 1,009 teachers from 79 schools in Northern Israel completed anonymous questionnaires about AO and innovation. Aggregation, descriptive statistics, bivariate correlation analyses and mediation analysis were performed to analyze the data.

Results showed that the components of AO, i.e., collective teacher efficacy, academic press and trust, were positively correlated to school innovation, and that trust mediated the relationship between collective teacher efficacy and school innovation. The study results confirmed that AO holds a significant predictive value in school innovation and highlights the importance of trust in supporting innovation.

As school leaders are challenged to foster innovative new practices in their schools, the findings suggest that they will need to know how to cultivate collective teacher efficacy, academic press and faculty trust.

This is the first study to examine the role of the components of AO in predicting innovation. By using a robust sample, the authors were able to examine the proposed school-level model with respect to the factors that affect school innovation. Originality also lies in the organizational approach to educational innovation in relation to faculty’s beliefs and behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the quality of collaboration towards Sustainable Energy Innovation (SEI) in Private Finance Initiative (PFI) projects. While the capacity of PFI to encourage collaboration towards innovation is largely advocated by its proponents; however, it remains to be supported by empirical evidence.

Adopting the Complex Product System (CoPS) innovation management model, the authors assess the quality of collaboration at the interface between the innovation superstructure of public sector clients and users, and the innovation infrastructure of private sector designers, contractors and operators. Two interactional elements are examined upon which the quality of collaboration is assessed: openness of communication and alignment of objectives. The authors apply the model to four new-built PFI school projects within the context of the UK government Building Schools for the Future Programme. Semi-structured interviews with total of 50 key stakeholders were used as the primary data collection method.

PFI has introduced a number of problematic issues weakening collaborative efforts towards innovation in the project environment. Particularly, the study underlines the restricting internal contractual relationships within the integrated Project Company and the misalignment of Design-Construction-Operation sustainability objectives. It also highlights ineffective communication with public sector clients and users brought in by the restricted nature of PFI engagement processes as well as the misalignment of public sector-private sector sustainability objectives.

The qualitative nature of the chosen research methodology limits the ability to generalise. The research findings need to be confirmed or rejected by means of quantitative research as representative of all PFI projects.

The study emphasizes the public authority’s role in relation to providing the necessary conditions for the creation of a collaborative environment conducive to SEI in PFI projects.

The study was able to expand the understanding of innovation and collaboration management processes in PFI projects in three respects: First, addressing the limited attention to innovation in PFI research, the study is the first to examine the quality of collaboration in PFI projects towards the implementation SEI. Second, examining the quality of collaboration in PFI projects through the lens of CoPS provides a new understanding of sustainability innovation and strongly indicates that the CoPS model should be expanded to account for the dynamics of innovation processes in the procurement of sustainable CoPS. Third, the explorative nature of the study was useful in generating research hypotheses that can form the basis for future research on SEI in PFI projects.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of implementing innovation in experimental schools (focussing on R & D) for school effectiveness post-intervention (five years). Based on theoretical models of social exchange and “conservation of resources” (Hobfoll, 1989), the authors focussed on assessing the effects of implementing innovation on individual outcomes (strain) and school level outcomes (social cohesion, emotional conflict, organizational innovation). The authors compared three types of schools: schools that have completed the implementation process (after), schools still in the implementation process (during) and schools not participating in the implementation process (control group).

A sample of 75 schools (23 non-experimental, 25 during the experiment, 27 post-experiment) was used. Data were collected from teachers and principals to avoid a single source bias.

MANOVA analyses suggest that the process of implementation of innovation contributes to organizational effectiveness: differences were found between the control group and the two groups of experimental schools. The two groups of experimental schools showed higher levels of organizational innovation and social cohesion and lower levels of emotional conflict and strain as compared to the control group.

This study concentrated on the question of the direct links between the study variables – the effects of the implementation of innovation on school functioning. It would be interesting to examine the limit conditions (encourage – discourage factors) for these relations.

Findings suggest that a structured process of implementing innovation contributes not only to the outcome of innovation in school, but also enhances overall school functioning.

Permits the authors to deepen the knowledge of the potential of organizational processes of innovation in schools over time (pre-during-post process).

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the dialectical interplay between centralisation and decentralisation forces so as to understand how schools leverage on its autonomous pedagogical space, influence the diffusion of innovations in the educational landscape of Singapore and how a centralised-decentralised system supports (or impedes) pedagogical reform for twenty-first century learning.

The paper first outlines the evolutionary stance of Singapore’s decentralisation from its past to present trajectories, thus providing a broader social-historical interpretation to its tight-loose-tight coupling of the education system; followed by situating the context of reform within the national narrative of Ministry of Education’s (MOE) twenty-first century competencies framework. The authors examine how school autonomy should be accompanied by systemic enabling mechanisms, through two case illustrations of whole-school reforms.

There are four carryover effects that the authors have observed: structural, socio-cultural, economic and epistemic. Middle managers from the two schools act as a pedagogical, socio-technological and financial broker outside the formal collaborative structures organised by the MOE. Such a “middle-out” approach, complemented by centralised mechanisms for “coeval sensing mechanism”, has resulted in boundary-spanning linkages and multiplier effects in terms of knowledge spillovers.

Socio-cultural context matters; and what constitutes as co-learning between policymakers and practitioners in Singapore may be construed as policing that stifles innovations in other contexts.

In addition to the conceptualisation of how school autonomy may lead to school-based innovations, the paper provided some preliminary empirical evidence of how the co-production of knowledge has been engendered within, across and beyond individual Singapore schools through the mechanism of innovation diffusion. The unit of analysis is innovation ecosystem.