Innovation Can Be Learned

A two-year project was organised to promote creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship for young people in eight Slovenian regions. The project's aim was to train teacher-mentors, who then trained pupils and worked with them and local community representatives to carry out projects. The paper presents the findings of a project that monitored the work of enterprise circles and analysed their strengths and weaknesses. Differences were also found between the positions taken by the group of teachers that participated in the project and a randomly selected control group of teachers. The findings indicate that teachers who led enterprise circles were critical of an over-emphasis on administrative work connected to the preparation of typical business plans. They were frustrated by overly detailed and prescriptive syllabuses, are more likely to accept pupils' ideas, and make more frequent use of ICT in their teaching. They are less likely to attribute open thinking and innovation to their schools and also believed that their schools were less tolerant of mistakes and put more emphasis on discipline. [For complete volume, see ED567118.]