American Scientist

It’s commonly understood that innovation is important in scientific research and economic development, but what does it mean to be innovative? Karen Oates, a professor of biochemistry and the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, as well as a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer, studies the types of environments and processes that can lead to greater innovation and deeper learning, in the classroom and in industry. She chatted about some of her findings with executive editor Fenella Saunders. A video of the full discussion is available here.

How do you concisely encapsulate what innovation means?

Really, it’s about creating something new, or looking at something in a very new way. That new thing has value, so there’s a value piece put onto innovation. You have seen something different, in something that’s already there, or something that is being created, and you have seen that that has value. It’s like connecting the dots. I can see dots and I can connect them, but what I need to do is see things that aren’t even there yet, and start to make some connections. That’s kind of an innovative way of thinking. I’ve always thought that in order to create an innovative environment you need to have divergent thinking first. What are all the possibilities? What are all the crazy ideas? What are all the things that are very different from the norm? Then you say, okay, from all of the possibilities, what are some things that make a lot of sense? What things have value? How do we now move this idea into an environment in which we have a lot more constricted possibilities? It’s divergent thinking moved to a convergent type of thinking.

Do you think innovativeness can be learned, or is it an inherent trait?

I believe that it is something that definitely can be learned. If we aren’t giving students the freedom to think, the freedom to take a real risk in being able to connect to things that we might not guess would be related, then we’re actually in a mode to constrict their innovative thinking and creativity.

Motivation and free will I think are very much part of the innovative process. Students who have free will make us, as teachers, quite honestly a little uncomfortable, because it means they have more voice, they have more control over what is going on in the classroom than if I was just getting up and telling the students what I know about a particular subject. I think one of the most daring things I’ve ever done is only write half a syllabus for a course, and have the students write the second half. That free will motivates the student to think differently. They have confidence that they can do something different, they can connect the dots. And it doesn’t have to be in the classroom; it could be outside the university or in the way clubs are run. The amount of time a student spends in the classroom is actually quite small, compared with all the learning they could be doing outside of the classroom as well.

What can professors do to make their courses more innovative?

My job is to connect the science that I’m teaching to what matters to students. I used to teach cell biology. I also taught a course called Cancer. Cancer is cell biology. When I taught Cancer, I made sure that all the elements that I needed to teach in cell biology were still taught, but in a very different way. This was, for me, a huge innovation. All of a sudden, it had relevance to me. Everybody knows someone who has had to deal with cancer. I did the same thing with immunology and HIV infection. Students cared about learning about HIV and cancer. Okay, they had to take cell biology and immunology, but that’s a very different way of thinking about it. The motivation behind everything that they learned was now very different.

I also challenge students with more debate-style types of environments. I start out with a case study, give students a little bit of knowledge, and then say, “Okay, give me all the possibilities.” Then I give them another little piece of knowledge and ask “Okay, what doesn’t make sense from all these different possibilities?” Until I give them enough that they can actually figure out the answer. Those types of protocols really help the students think about their learning. It doesn’t mean that they get to tell you everything they want to learn, or that you don’t have to go over some of the very basic things they may not want to study, it’s just how you do it. They have to understand the relevance of it in their lives. Those are all important skills that build an innovative environment.

What are some ways to make learning environments more innovative?

Many times innovations come from necessity. Having students in an uncomfortable environment, for me, is not such a bad thing. Putting them in a situation they’ve never been in before, but giving them the confidence to be able to solve whatever it is that’s before them, that problem that this unusual environment gives them, really helps them with divergent thinking, and then having actually do something to solve the problem.

I went to the Republic of Georgia with some students many years ago, from a university that had lots of equipment and instrumentation, and we were doing some work on water. They partnered with students from one of the universities there, and those students didn’t have the same equipment or environment, yet they had to solve the same problem. They went about it in a very different way than my students did. I thought to myself, wow, that was pretty innovative what they did. I wondered if my students would have been able to figure that out, because I’m not giving them some uncomfortable environment in which they don’t have everything in front of them. So there’s a design piece to innovation.

How can you give students the confidence to trust their own decisions in developing innovative solutions?

Things like free will allow students to take risks in an environment in which they’re not going to fail a grade or lose their scholarship. Giving them that kind of environment in which they are a part of solving something that has meaning, that will help society, that will solve a big problem, is going to be key.

I don’t think you have to teach a separate course on innovation. I come from the idea that there are many things that we can be doing in our classrooms, with the content that we have and in the time period that we have with our students, that will give them some of those skills that allow them to connect dots in ways that they didn’t know even existed.

You could be teaching a course on cell biology or biochemistry, and you could still create an environment in which students are practicing the skills of innovation. Not until they come up with the problem that’s relevant to them will they maybe use it, but you’ve got to be able to give them the freedom to do things a little bit differently, without such high risk, in an environment that is not so stressful, and one that takes into account their intrinsic motivation—intrinsic because they do it for its own sake. You can start connecting things to something that has really great meaning to them. Those are the kind of environments that I think are really important for the student.

How can innovative environments extend from the classroom to industry?

My industrial partners tell me that one of the best things for them is bringing in students who know a little, but don’t know as much as they do. Then they have a nice discussion with students about what they think could be a solution. Partnerships are clearly important to industry. Bringing in a mind that is fully formed, but which may not have all of the content that experts have, allows students to look at something in a very different way, because they don’t know what the norm is. These kinds of partnerships with different skill sets, and different, even generational, changes I think are really important. My industrial leaders tell me, there’s really nothing more exciting for them than to sit down with a bunch of young people who have studied the same subjects they have, but studied them in a very different way, and let them help the team solve a problem.

How can we improve environments for younger children to encourage innovation and creativity?

Give them some time just to explore, just to pick up a rock, look underneath, and tell a story about what kind of ecosystem is under there. Have them look up in the sky and create their own type of constellation, and tell a story about what that constellation might look like. These are the practices of someone having free will and the ability to hear their voice and to feel good about themselves.

I used to have a camp in the summer for younger kids on creativity. I would just give them odd things and say, “Put it together and tell me what you made.” They would come up with the most marvelous type of different gadgets. The inventions wouldn’t work most of the time, but that didn’t really matter. The idea is to let them practice.

When my children were in fourth grade, I was asked to judge a science fair, and I refused. If you have all the kids bring in their collections, and have a collection fair, I would do that. All their collections get put into little subgroups. My kids would have shells, and they would bring in all the shells that we’ve collected from all the beaches by state. Then they’d have a second subclass that was shells that are pink, shells that are white, and so on. This type of fair is probably a better way to have students think about science. It’s looking at things, trying to connect certain things, putting similar things together, or things that are very different together. Those are all different ways of thinking. We have to spend more time on the thinking aspects of innovation and a lot less on teaching to a test.

How can we better foster an intrinsic interest in innovative science in a more diverse population?

I think this question brings up community-based science—science that helps a particular community. If you look at a problem in your neighborhood or home, one that is connected to you, it has meaning to you, and you have the ability to think in a very different way. When it comes to getting a diverse group of people to study science, let’s think about where they live, how they live, and what some of the problems are that they have to deal with, and then we can show the power of science to solve problems that are relevant to them.

What are the best ways for diverse teams to be innovative together?

I certainly think there are multiple ways to do it. My very favorite way is to go out into the environment in which something exists that is of importance. Let’s all look at waste water. Let’s look at it from the point of view of, here is a factory, here is a wetlands, and here is a lake. What do we see? What do I see that you don’t see? What do you see that I don’t? Let’s just look at things in a very different way. It’s great to be around a table, and sometimes that works. Other times it’s good to take a walk, take a look at the environment that you’re trying to problem solve. If it’s something that’s kind of intangible, then sometimes a drawing, visualizing something, is also really important. You can visualize something in a different way than I can visualize it. Maybe when I see it in the way that you see it, we can start to connect those dots.

I think that surely there’s not one way or another—everybody’s different. My students love to learn by doing, by having a voice, and by being active. I believe in very active pedagogies of engagement. That doesn’t mean that I actually learned that way. In fact, I was a very quiet learner. I was a person who went to a lecture, took notes, and went into the library and closed that little cubby hole door so I could concentrate. Everybody’s different, but that’s the beauty of bringing different people together to help solve problems.

Has anything about studying innovation in learning surprised you?

I learned something a few years ago that shocked me. I always would pride myself on being able to teach a course in a way that was very clear. I thought I could explain it in a way that it was so clear to students, it was all laid out, so how could they not get it? Then I did some research and looked at some of the other aspects of learning, and found that actually that isn’t such a good idea. I began to wonder why it is that helping a student totally understand how a particular mechanism works isn’t actually that helpful to them? The research shows that you have to confuse it just a little bit to let them unconfuse it, to let them learn it for themselves, to put themselves into the answer. You can give them your answer and tell them exactly how it goes, but the reality is, in their minds, they have to do it themselves. I can remember being kind of shocked and I thinking, “Oh my gosh, all these years, I’ve just stressed these mechanisms and how they work.” When I taught biochemistry, I would spend hours and hours on one lecture, and now find that there should have been a little bit left for them to do.