ABOUT THE „INNOVA” RESEARCH PROJECT
The Emergence and Diffusion of Local Innovations and their Systemic
Impact in the Education Sector
Principal
Investigator: Gábor Halász
Funding: Hungarian
Scientific Research Fund (OTKA)
Project Number:
115857
The objective of
the “Innova” research project is to explore the birth and spread of
non-coordinated micro-level (local, school level) educational innovations and
their influence at system level. Our specific goal is to identify factors
determining the emergence and diffusion of innovations aimed at improving the
quality of learning environments. The project – funded by National Research, Development and
Innovation Office (former Hungarian Scientific Research Fund - OTKA) – was
started in February 2016. The research project is based on the detailed concept
submitted to the funding agency.
The “Innova”
project is the follow-up our former “ImpAla” research project[1] which has investigated the impact mechanisms of EU
funded curriculum development programs in Hungary. While the “ImpAla” project
was focusing on “top-down” innovations,
the focus of the “Innova” project is on “bottom-up”
innovation processes. A further difference is that while the “ImpAla” project
was covering only primary and secondary education, the “Innova” project covers
all subsystems of education, including kindergartens, primary and secondary
schools, general and vocational training, higher education and profit-oriented
or non-profit private education.
The “Innova”
project places the research on educational innovation into the broader
framework of innovation studies, with
a special emphasis on public sector
innovation. The theoretical phase of the project has produced, beyond a
number of analyses (most of them being available in Hungarian) a general conceptual
framework which guided the elaboration of the first “Innova”
questionnaire. This questionnaire was sent to more than 15.000
educational units in Hungary in November 2016.
In the middle of
February 2017 the Innova database comprised data from more than 5200
educational units (88% from pre-schools and schools, 10% from departments of
higher education institutions and 2% from private adult education units). The
figure below shows the distribution of all educational units in function of the
answers given to one of the questions of the Innova questionnaire:
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The “Innova”
project is coordinated by the Research
Centre on Higher Education and Innovation (RCHEI) of the Faculty of
Education and Psychology of ELTE University, Budapest. The principal
investigator is Professor Gábor Halász, the leader of RCHEI (see his personal
website here).