Fostering Innovative Capacity

It is now almost a cliché - schools are educating kids for jobs that don’t exist yet, so the focus needs to be more on skills rather than on content. Can the educational programmes of contemporary cultural institutions supplement schooling and help foster the creativity, innovation capacity and ‘21st century skills’ of young learners? If so, in what ways can they do that, and what challenges do they face in making their work more effective? Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews with workshop organisers working in institutions that merge media, contemporary art and technology, this research identifies six ways in which competence cultivation takes place and five major problems that hinder efforts. The results offer a classification of the possible effects of this form of education and identify policy steps that might improve the outcomes of such educational activities.