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The purpose of this paper is to present an analytical review of the educational innovation field in the USA. It outlines classification of innovations, discusses the hurdles to innovation, and offers ways to increase the scale and rate of innovation-based transformations in the education system.

The paper is based on a literature survey and author research.

US education badly needs effective innovations of scale that can help produce the needed high-quality learning outcomes across the system. The primary focus of educational innovations should be on teaching and learning theory and practice, as well as on the learner, parents, community, society, and its culture. Technology applications need a solid theoretical foundation based on purposeful, systemic research, and a sound pedagogy. One of the critical areas of research and innovation can be cost and time efficiency of the learning.

Several practical recommendations stem out of this paper: how to create a base for large-scale innovations and their implementation; how to increase effectiveness of technology innovations in education, particularly online learning; how to raise time and cost efficiency of education.

Innovations in education are regarded, along with the education system, within the context of a societal supersystem demonstrating their interrelations and interdependencies at all levels. Raising the quality and scale of innovations in education will positively affect education itself and benefit the whole society.

Originality is in the systemic approach to education and educational innovations, in offering a comprehensive classification of innovations; in exposing the hurdles to innovations, in new arguments about effectiveness of technology applications, and in time efficiency of education.

This chapter presents a model of innovation in the public elementary schooling system by drawing on ongoing work on an “Educational Innovations Bank” in India, which seeks to make available a freely accessible forum for innovative teachers and a grassroots innovations resource for administrators. How do some teachers in government elementary schools, working in contexts of socioeconomic and educational deprivation, achieve their educational goals in spite of facing the same constraints as thousands of other teachers? What lessons do they offer for policy reform? The answers draw on the social entrepreneurship and workplace innovation literature to first locate the incentive for innovation in the social value that socio-educationally entrepreneurial and innovative behavior of teachers creates. Next, an examination is presented of how this social value leads to learning for an identity of competence, which in turn provides an incentive for further educational innovation. Finally, the evidence is presented to argue for policy entrepreneurship and a formal framework to help in the diffusion, adoption, and adaptation of both the enabling innovations that result from socio-educational entrepreneurship and the in-school or in-class educational innovations. Such a “bottom-up,” peer-learning-based approach to innovations that also “improve” provides a unique way of visualizing educational reform in resource-constrained public educational systems.

Evidence suggests that international comparison has become a ubiquitous component of educational innovation and entrepreneurship in spite of significant variation among educational contexts worldwide. This chapter provides an overview of educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship from an internationally comparative perspective. The influence that the global shift from natural resource and industry-based economies to knowledge-based economies has had on the development of educational innovation and entrepreneurship is explained. Several examples of educational innovation and education-oriented public sector entrepreneurship highlight the discussion, which concludes with an examination of specific knowledge society issues related to educational entrepreneurship and its reciprocal effect on innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the development of a knowledge management system. It allows the creation of new knowledge, its consolidation, distribution and combination in the field of educational innovation, in such a way that the knowledge is transferred from individuals to the organisation and from the organisation to individuals. To achieve this, the knowledge spirals of Nonaka are integrated. The epistemological spiral is used to obtain the ontologies that feed the ontological spiral.

More than 600 university teachers participated in the research and the development of the management system, in which more than 400 educational innovation experiences and 1,100 authors have been included.

The epistemological spiral is used to obtain the ontologies that feed the ontological spiral. The result is a double spiral that allows the contribution of a conceptual model and the development of an innovative tool that enables and automates the effective management of knowledge in educational innovation.

A repository about educational innovation best practices and experiences is available.

The presented model for the sustainability and evolution for an educational innovation best practices repositories has a huge impact for education innovation recognition in the professional development of university teachers. On the other hand, it is way of sharing best practices of educational innovation all over the world.

The major contribution of this research work is based on the way that the knowledge is transferred from individuals to the organisation and from the organisation to individuals. The classification schema and the proposed indicators are based on the elicitation of more than 600 experts and the study of a corpus of more than 400 educational innovation experiences that involve 1,100 university teachers approximately.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the trends for educational innovation in higher education in Brazil, constructing a conceptual model of innovation trends in the sector.

A preliminary profile online was done with 76 experts in university education, and 17 were contacted for in-depth perceptions. The analysis of the content was made of all material and, as a result, the critical analysis of the results, which culminated in the development of a conceptual model and characterization of trends, dimensions and subdimensions to innovation in higher education.

The dimension universal design of accessibility and learning had major considerations, contributing to implementation of new innovative practices for higher education. Some subdimensions emerged, namely, governance, risk management, curricular extension and affirmative policies.

The difficulty in performing the deepening of all dimensions involved in terms of plurality of specialties involved.

The use of the model and characterization of trends could serve as tools to support the strategic planning of HEI, and the trends allow planning innovation practices, favoring improvements of higher education institutions (HEI), students, employees and community to learning organization.

The identification of trends for higher education, highlighting innovation indicators or successful practices, and the characterization of the dimensions and subdimensions trends, and undeniable contribution to measure the educational innovation in higher education.

Encourages researchers, in partnership with institutions, to develop scientific projects with other institutions and researchers, to meet interests not only of HEI as a whole but also of countries that prioritize education with quality, to reach the real educational objectives.

Much of the literature on innovation and entrepreneurship in education focuses on how external ideas, processes, and techniques can be applied to education systems, schools, and classrooms to improve educational performance. Little research, however, addresses the ways that internal ideas, processes, and techniques within educational systems, schools, and classrooms impart innovation and entrepreneurial skills to youth worldwide. This chapter identifies ways that these skills can be developed in youth through mass education systems. Particular attention is given to the ways that youth are prepared to participate in the knowledge economy by becoming information innovators and knowledge entrepreneurs.

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.

Entrepreneurial approaches to public mass education are not easily developed or managed by public sector institutions. Instead, private sector entities are often responsible for the development and implementation of innovative and entrepreneurial education. Part of the reason may be the resistance to change that isomorphism in mass education engenders, but the involvement of privately-funded, organized, and managed organizations plays a significant role as well. Private sector-driven educational change has become the dominant mode of entrepreneurship in 21st century national educational systems, but there are challenges and obstacles to privately managing public sector institutions such as education and the activities or curricula that comprise its core. To understand this phenomena the promises and challenges for innovation and entrepreneurship are discussed through an institutional framework.

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).

What does it take to successfully implement new educational innovation in schools, and what roles does lesson study play there? In order to answer this question, this study investigated the implementation of Sesame Street's Dream–Save–Do (DSD) curriculum that was designed to help children in a Japanese elementary school learn to pursue their own dreams.

The authors first reviewed available documents on the DSD curriculum in the district, and then conducted DSD class observations. The authors also interviewed the students, teachers, the principal, the lead teacher at the school, the school district staff in charge of the operation as well as the Sesame Japan staff in order to collect the data for the study.

The study found that students were highly engaged in open-ended discussions about their future dreams and how to achieve them in observed DSD classes. The implementation of the new curriculum benefited from utilizing lesson study as the main arena for curricular innovation. A further analysis of the data suggests that the success of the curricular innovation owed much to an inside-out implementation process that situated the iterative lesson study cycle of the teachers as the key driver of change while external actors supported the lesson study process in an inside-out fashion.

The study implies that guiding an educational innovation to success requires not only institutionalized lesson study, but also cross-institutional collaborative dialogues to support the lesson study process with mutually established trust among key players of the innovation. Further studies are needed to investigate how this model sustains as principals and how this model works (or do not work) in other pilot schools and beyond.

This study implies that what matters most is that the school embodies a vision shared among teachers, school leaders and external curriculum developers, all working together across institutions in a spirit of collaboration. This type of inside-out implementation would be a path to ensure and sustain the success for those who plan any new educational innovation.

What matters most was found to be that the school embodies a vision shared among educators, school leaders and external curriculum developers working together across institutions in a spirit of collaboration.

Guiding an educational innovation to success requires not only new ideas and effective curriculum plans but also a social structure that allows teachers to engage in effective implementations of the desired curriculum. Lesson study is often considered to be a within-school or school-to-school collaborative process. It is rarely connected to outside agents that bring in new ideas for educational innovation. This study found how inside- and outside-school actors can work together to actualize educational innovation, and what roles lesson study play there.