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The OECD Innovation Strategy was launched by Ministers at their May 2007 Ministerial Council Meeting. There a mandate was given to address countries’ needs for a more comprehensive, coherent, and timely understanding of how to promote, measure and assess innovation and its underlying dynamics of change. In response, the OECD is developing a horizontal and multidisciplinary strategy for addressing the needs of countries for advice on harnessing the potential of innovation as a driver of growth and productivity, equity and development. One of the horizontal working groups of the Innovation Strategy is focussing on the role of human capital.

Human resources have long been a priority subject for governments because of their significance for economic and social development. While human resources remain essential for knowledge-based economies, the skills and competencies required for innovation are broad and may be changing since innovation outputs and processes are characterised by diversity and heterogeneity. While the innovation process was traditionally viewed as relying on researchers inventing new products, this is only one part of the picture. Incremental innovation and the improvement of organisational efficiency and routines, for example, can come from a range of workers, not just managers, researchers’ or external consultants, and rely on different skills and competencies. Some innovations clearly come from practitioners operating within communities of practice. Increasingly, innovation is also consumer-driven, and an open question is whether the growing importance of this trend is linked to the emergence of a more educated (and thus demanding) consumer population. Moreover, non-technological innovation (for example, new organisational methods, or marketing innovations) requires specialist skill-sets well beyond traditional science and engineering training. Innovation also involves the capacity to change or to retrain following the introduction of radically new products and processes.

Linked to this is understanding how innovative practices can be introduced, adopted and mainstreamed within education and training systems in order to improve their learning, equity and efficiency outcomes, but also to foster the innovation skills required in the future.

This two-day workshop aims to:

Workshop documents

Background documents

PowerPoint presentations from the meeting