Developing social innovation and entrepreneurship competences and skills of children and young people is on the agenda of European educational policy-makers. The European research and innovation project "DOIT -- Entrepreneurial skills for young social innovators in an open digital world" suggests using makerspaces and tools, within…

The purpose of this study is to determine the direction of causality between the quality of education and technological development for the selected Northern European countries over the period 2006-2017. To this end, we employ the bootstrap panel causality test. The findings of our study indicate that the quality of education leads to changes in…

Government regulations require businesses to improve their processes and products/services in a green and sustainable manner. For being environmentally friendly, businesses should invest more on eco-innovation practices. Firms eco-innovate to promote eco-efficiency and sustainability. This paper evaluates the eco-innovation performance of…

What is it about afterschool that gives it so much potential to powerfully influence educational best practices around the world? This paper will explore what truly defines "afterschool" beyond the time- and location-based pedagogy of the term and will make the case for the use of "expanded learning" or "expanded…

In this article, innovative activity is considered in the light of broader conceptualisations of innovativeness and what it means to be innovative. Central to the definition of innovativeness used in the analysis is that the worker actively seeks new knowledge and uses it for work-related tasks. This is based on previous research emphasising…

Over time international large-scale assessments have grown in terms of number of studies, cycles, and participating countries, many of which are a heterogeneous mix of economies, languages, cultures, and geography. This heterogeneity has meaningful consequences for comparably measuring both achievement and non-achievement constructs, such as…

Chapter 1 starts out with a short historical view on "academisation" and "professionalisation," illustrating how much professional higher education (PHE) in Europe has been in flux in the past years. With examples from France and Ireland, the chapter argues how a new spectrum of missions, differences in national organization of…

Innovation is essential for the education sector. The ways in which curriculum decision making is organised reflects different implicit approaches on how educational systems pertain to promote innovation in education. Curriculum holds an outstanding place when seeking to promote innovation in education, as it reflects the vision for education by…

Successful education systems are those that promote leadership at all levels, thereby encouraging teachers and principals, regardless of the formal positions they occupy, to lead innovation in the classroom, the school and the system as a whole. This report summarises evidence from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey and the OECD…

Three Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland and Norway, participated in the IEA SITES 2006 study. All the three countries have launched huge policy and investment programmes to promote digital literacy and readiness for the information age. In relation to the remarkable Finnish Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, it is…

Do some forms of student (and school) assessment hinder the introduction of innovative educational practices and the development of innovation skills in education systems? This report focuses on the impact of high-stake summative assessment on innovation and argues that it is possible to reconcile high-stakes assessments and examinations through…

In 12 brief chapters, a view is provided of elementary school improvement efforts made by participants in the Contact School Plan of the Council of Europe's Council for Cultural Co-operation. The Contact School Plan created a network of 12 schools implementing innovative educational practices in as many nations. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the…

The contribution of higher education institutions to regional development is a theme that has attracted growing attention in recent years. Knowledge institutions are increasingly expected not only to conduct education and research, but also to play an active role in the economic, social and cultural development of their regions. The extent to…

Non-formal adult educational programs in Scandinavian and North American popular movements have often been used to advance popular, democractic movements in both areas. Folk schools are often viewed as a panacea for social and educational problems, but as the findings here demonstrate, it is not just education but the mobilization of people around…