Activity 4.1 - Innovation and Politics

Here begins a series of four blog entries based on the PEST framework (no, I'd never heard of that before either). PEST stands for: Political, Economic, Social, Technical. It's a way of looking at the bigger picture.

 The theme I have chosen for my H818 project, is innovation. Google defines innovation as: "The act of making changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas or products." I think of everything in educational terms, so I think about innovations in the field of education - interactive whiteboards, voting systems, virtual learning environments, etc. Today though, I'm going to attempt to think politics.

I didn't know where to start but Google is always there to help. I learned a lot, though as always, it was difficult to work out what the most relevant search results are. Here are my top three:

1. Innovate UK - the UK's innovation agency; an executive non-departmental public body. From their site, I was able to search policy documents on a whole range of industries (including education) and find links to other organisations that might be relevant.

2. British Innovation is Not Dead - a Guardian article from 2012. I liked one particular part of this, which probably will be raised when I look at social factors.

What I liked about this quote is not that one innovative idea is necessarily better than another, but that innovation is not new. I think we can be sucked into thinking that innovation is all about technology but that's only this generation. Most of the things we take for granted were once innovative inventions.

3. Nesta - "an innovation charity with a mission to help people and organisations bring great ideas to life" (Nesta website). I can already hear you asking how that fits with politics but it was a fun quiz they offer about innovation policy. I love online quizzes so I gave it a go. I didn't expect to do very well but the last hour or so of research helped me immensely. Give it a go. Here's my result: