The IPL newsletter: Volume 9, Issue 182

Innovating to Learn, Learning to Innovate

OECD
OECD economies have experienced the transformation from their traditional industrial base to the knowledge era, in which learning and innovation are central. Yet, many of today’s schools have not caught up: they continue to operate as they did in the earlier decades of the 20 century. This book summarizes and discusses key findings from the learning sciences, shedding light on the cognitive and social processes that can be used to redesign classrooms to make them highly effective learning environments. It explores concrete examples in OECD countries, from alternative schools to specific cases in Mexico, in which the actors are seeking to break the mould and realise the principles emerging from learning science research. The book also asks how these insights can inspire educational reform for the knowledge era, in which optimising learning is the driving aim and in which innovation is both the widespread catalyst of change and the defining result.

Entrepreneurship and Higher Education

OECD
Stimulating innovative and growth-oriented entrepreneurship is a key economic and societal challenge to which universities and colleges have much to contribute. This book examines the role that higher education institutions are currently playing through teaching entrepreneurship and transferring knowledge and innovation to enterprises and discusses how they should develop this role in the future. The key issues, approaches and trends are analysed and compared across a range of countries, from the experiences of the most entrepreneurial universities in North America to advanced European models and emerging practices in Central and Eastern Europe. It is clear that entrepreneurship engagement is a rapidly expanding and evolving aspect of higher education that requires proper support and development. The book stresses the need to expand existing entrepreneurship efforts and introduce more creative and effective approaches, building on the best practices highlighted from around the world. It will provide inspiration for those in higher education seeking to expand and improve their entrepreneurship teaching and knowledge-transfer activities, and for policy makers who wish to provide appropriate support initiatives and frameworks.

How Academia and Government Can Work Together

Council for Science and Technology, CST 
A healthy engagement between academics and policy makers is essential to the provision of informed, evidence based, world-class policy making. Academics already play a key part throughout the policy making process, providing advice on a huge number of topics to recipients at all levels of Government. The diversity of the UK’s world-class academic expertise means that it is a formidable
resource for policy-makers in the UK. By engaging with policy makers academics become involved in answering some of the most challenging questions faced by the UK, and their ideas contribute to national policy. This investigation shows that the engagement between academics and policy makers in the UK is not as strong as it might be. A great deal of goodwill exists on both sides and strides have been taken in recent years to strengthen engagement: in particular through the introduction of Departmental Chief Scientific Advisers and Scientific Advisory Councils, and clear commitments by Government to evidence-based policy. Despite this CST has identified areas on both sides where improvements clearly can and should be made.

2008 State New Economy Index: Benchmarking Economic Transformation in the States

ITIF
This report sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, employs 29 indicators to assess the extent to which the 50 state economies in the US are structured according to the tenets of the New Economy. The changing economic landscape requires state economies to be innovative, globally-linked, entrepreneurial and dynamic, with an educated workforce and all sectors embracing the use of information technology. The report, which updates and expands on the State New Economy Index reports from 2002 and 2007, ranks the states accordingly. The five states ranking the highest in 2008 are, in order of rank, Massachusetts, Washington, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. With these measures as a frame of reference, the report outlines the next generation of innovative state-level public policies needed to meet the challenges of the New Economy, improve state competitiveness and boost incomes of all Americans.

Breaking Ranks: Tools to Measure University Performance

OECD
University league tables are fashionable, but should not be taken as accurate measures of the quality of education.The OECD Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) study aims at determining whether it is possible to make meaningful statements about the education provided in universities in different countries, taking into account different “strands” of competence: skill in a chosen discipline, and generic skills such as critical thinking or the ability to apply knowledge practically. If successful, AHELO will provide institutions with analysis to help them improve their own performance, and will provide data that will help students assess the suitability of the institution for their own needs.

Measuring Entrepreneurship: A Digest of Indicators

OECD
Over the past ten years, the OECD has addressed entrepreneurship issues in various analyses and reports. While these studies compiled relevant data to support specific research or policy tasks, no effort was made to establish an ongoing database of entrepreneurship across OECD countries. In 2004, the 2nd OECD Ministerial Conference on SMEs in Istanbul, “Promoting Entrepreneurship and Innovative SMEs in a Global Economy”, concluded that the statistical base for entrepreneurship research was weak and urged the OECD to develop “a robust and comparable statistical base on which SME policy can be developed”. In 2005, the Kauffman Foundation provided the OECD the financial support for a feasibility study to explore what could be done to improve entrepreneurship data. Encouraged by the feasibility study, the OECD launched the Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP) in 2006 in order to build internationally comparable statistics on entrepreneurship and its determinants. In 2007, Eurostat joined forces with the OECD to create a joint OECD-Eurostat EIP, and work began with the development of standard definitions and concepts as a basis for the collection of empirical data. This report presents the results of the first round of empirical data collected under the EIP.