Lecture
In contemporary science, in the context of examining the innovation phenomenon, various concepts, categories, and definitions are used: innovative potential, innovativeness of the personality, innovation and innovation-management competence, readiness for innovative activity, and others.
Traditionally, the problem of innovative potential was developed by systems theory within the framework of economic concepts of scientific and technological progress. Recently, owing to its multidimensional nature, it has moved beyond economic science proper and is finding productive application in many fields of scientific knowledge.
Although H. Barnett already addressed the category of "innovative potential of the personality" back in 1953, innovativeness as a psychological category has been studied intensively only in recent decades and is most often regarded as a person's ability to perceive, single out, refine, and implement new and original ideas.
Innovative potential — the set of characteristics of a socio-economic system (an individual, a team, an enterprise, a city, a region, a country, humanity) that determine its capacity to create, implement, and disseminate new ideas, technologies, and products.
In the Western sociological literature of the 1960s–70s. The very concept of an innovative, pioneering personality as a type sharply contrasted with the dependent, authoritarian personality was first introduced by E. Hagen in 1962. He identified the following traits of the innovative personality: a curious attitude toward the world, support for innovation and originality of thought in others, one's own striving for novelty, and a creative spirit.
In the 1970s, Western scholars carried out a comparative study of the social and cultural aspects of development in many developing countries. As a result, they constructed what they considered to be an analytical model of the modern personality, which was called
the model of the innovative personality. Nine traits were identified in it.
Briefly, they are as follows:
. It is difficult to say, in my view, that this understanding of the innovative personality amounts to an analytical understanding of it. This, too, is an empirical description
of the personality.
In order to study strategies of innovative behavior among managers, we, together with T. N. Stepina (Stepina, 2010, 2011), conducted a survey of heads of educational institutions (hereafter EIs). The survey results showed that their innovative activity is polymotivated and shaped by:
Among the external causes that determined the need for innovative activity, the heads of educational institutions named the following:
Based on the survey results, a generalized profile of the contemporary head of an educational institution was compiled. Heads of educational institutions, as a rule, consider themselves successful in their professional activity. The innovations implemented by heads of educational institutions are new for the institution, contribute to scientific knowledge, professional growth, and moral-ethical satisfaction, introduce new technologies, methods, and forms of instruction, change the psychological and pedagogical conditions, and optimize the functioning of the institution. A third of the heads of educational institutions draw on the experience of their staff and
the experience of fellow heads of educational institutions in their innovative activity.
A third of the heads arrive at new managerial decisions as a result of innovation. However, only a fifth of the heads apply innovations in managing their institution,
that is, they strive to reach a contemporary level of leadership. Heads show a striving to master new personal-professional experience, new algorithms and ways of performing their work, to introduce an innovative approach in their professional activity, and to combine elements of known technologies in new, constructive ways.
At the same time, heads lack up-to-date scientific knowledge in the field of educational management. They are in no hurry to change their management style or their style of communicating with staff. Some heads would like to build up their own experience in the ability to motivate the teaching staff toward change and to cope with staff's psychological resistance. At the same time, heads adhere to their habitual (established) style of leadership and interaction within the educational institution, and are reluctant to part with outdated means of influencing the subjects of the educational process. It is difficult for them to develop an effective style of their own professional activity, to build a model for the development of the educational institution, or to carry out improvement and rationalization.
Heads make insufficient use of diagnostics of the instructional process and of their own managerial activity, and of the study of contemporary innovations in education and of staff mood.
The attainment of their own creative personal-professional goals is of little significance to heads of educational institutions. Their personal potential remains unrealized. Heads give little thought to professional-personal self-improvement and self-realization, to raising their level of managerial skill, and are not motivated to implement innovations in the management of their institution or to develop managerial and communicative abilities.
Perhaps for this reason, the innovations introduced by heads of educational institutions are not regarded by them as a means of personal growth. The complexity of the innovations being implemented was noted – for the level of managerial innovative potential, by 42.08% of heads; for their abilities in managerial activity, by 21.04%; for the psychological stability of their own personality, by 10.52%, while 5.26% of heads cited it for communicative abilities; persistence in achieving personal-professional goals; inner volitional regulation toward self-improvement and self-realization; level of professional skill; and level of personal motivation.
According to 36.82% of respondents, the greatest difficulties for heads of educational institutions are caused by the stage of the emergence of the innovation and the stage of routinization; 26.3% of respondents named the stage of struggle with opponents; 21.04% named the stage of dissemination.
The heads surveyed named various effects that, in their opinion, innovative activity produces: cognitive-scientific (52.6%), professional growth (47.34%), moral-ethical (47.34%), personal growth (21.04%), social
(21.04%), emotional (15.78%); no economic effect was named.
To remove anti-innovation barriers, heads make insufficient use of collegial planning of innovative activity, changes in norms of behavior and relationships within the teaching staff, raising teachers' creative potential, establishing public relations, raising the level of performance skill within the teaching staff, self-improvement, organizing creative groups, satisfying teachers' material needs, raising emotional stability, and raising teachers' psychological competence, or other forms of stimulation.
The innovations of heads of educational institutions are directed to a greater extent toward raising teachers' professional skill, and to a lesser extent toward developing professionally important qualities of their own personality.
The results of the study show the need to study such a phenomenon as innovative competence, to describe its construct, and to determine its place within the structure of the head's innovative personal potential.
In her dissertation, L.O. Kocheshkova (Kocheshkova, 2007) introduces the concept of «the innovative competence of the head of an educational institution». In her view, innovative competence includes: professional preparedness for managing innovative activity (research knowledge, abilities, skills);
professional aptitude for managing innovative activity (motives, professionally significant qualities, individual psychological characteristics); and professional experience and effectiveness in managing a developing educational institution (quality of activity, effectiveness of activity).
The innovative competence of the subject, according to V.V. Pozdnyakov (Pozdnyakov, 2008), is determined by at least two components: an innovative reading of the basic units accepted in this sphere of activity (for example, a managerial decision), and the ability to productively change, in accordance with the goal, the elements of innovative activity and its object as a whole. Pozdnyakov V.V. holds that «innovative competence» expresses a special qualitative state of the subject of innovative activity. Depending on the orientation of the latter, this quality manifests
itself as a ratio of specific competencies needed to achieve the goal when working with objects being transformed, or with new objects.
Innovative competence, notes Pozdnyakov V.V., presupposes a special innovative receptivity in the subject: receptivity to innovations or discoveries as such; the ability to see elements of the new within what is relatively established; and the ability to propose a fundamentally new solution to a problem. A distinctive feature of innovative thinking is that it is innovatively adaptive, which presupposes in the subject
a specific selective attitude toward the object of innovative change, resulting from correlating and ranking problem-solving methods by the criterion of optimality, «to fit the problem».
Boris I.V. (Boris I.V., 2010) regards innovation competence as a qualitative indicator of the readiness of human resources (using the example of library specialists) for change, one that is supported by the specialist's personal activity and by the conditions of organizational culture.
The study of the problem of innovation competence and its individual components is important not only for innovation activity as such, but also for training personnel within an educational system that gives priority to developing a creative personality capable of setting its own goals for growth. At present, with the introduction, from September 1, 2011, of the new third-generation Federal State Educational Standards of Higher Professional Education (FSES HPE), which offer a description of a graduate's key innovation competencies, the development of the concepts of innovation potential and innovation competence has become even more relevant.
Boinchanu G.I. (Boinchanu, 2011) identifies the innovation competence of teaching staff as one of the determining conditions for improving the quality of the educational process. She views this competence as a psychological phenomenon characterizing a teacher's creative orientation toward the qualitative transformation of educational practice through new means, in order to increase its effectiveness, as well as the teacher's ability to identify current problems in students' education and to find and implement effective ways of solving them. Boinchanu
G.I. proposes including the following components in the structure of teachers' innovation competence: motivational-value, moral-ethical, cognitive, operational, communicative, and reflective.
The results of a study by T.N. Stepina, conducted under our supervision, made it possible to describe several types of educational institution leaders according to the level of development of their innovation competence.
We classified as the «first type» those leaders who overcome the bureaucratic approach to implementing innovative ideas, introduce innovations into the management process of the institution, and use modern computer and information technologies in managing
the institution, establish a multidisciplinary institution, implement the idea of a unified educational complex in line with their institution's profile, organize the work of the teaching staff in the direction of “theory + practice”, and ensure that instructional and educational tasks are addressed with new information technologies taken into account.
A leader of this type promotes the development of innovation processes associated with identifying the creative potential of all participants in the pedagogical process. He supports the leadership of every teacher, introduces innovations into teaching methods, technologies and techniques, into the upbringing and development of students' personalities, supports teachers' desire to work in an innovative mode (using new teaching technologies and new developmental educational programs), and introduces innovations that encourage staff to improve their qualifications.
Leaders of the «second type»: creatively self-actualized. They direct their creative potential toward realizing the potentials of their own personality and their own potential as a leader. Such leaders freely realize their vision for the development of the educational institution, create conditions for the creative work of teachers and students, apply the creative experience of leaders of educational institutions in other regions (documents, programs, etc.), strive to change the existing state of affairs in education, and fully realize their creative plans and ideas in leading and developing the educational institution. They know how to take responsibility both for the failure and for the success of their educational institution. They manage experimental activity within the institution, carry out their own research activity, and organize innovation among teachers,
making use of teachers' creative initiative. However, as a rule, they do not implement long-term experiments in the institution and are not able to turn it into an independent organization or become an entrepreneurial leader.
Such leaders, most often, keep up with everything new happening in education, not losing sight of what is most important in teaching, upbringing, and the development of students; they introduce innovations into methods, technologies, and techniques of instruction and into the upbringing and personal development of students, and they promote the development of innovative processes connected with identifying the creative potential of all participants in the pedagogical process.
Leaders of the «third type»: rarely organize research activity among students and teachers or long-term experiments, combine pedagogical science with practice (bringing in researchers, establishing close contact with teacher-training universities), and apply the creative experience of leaders of educational institutions in other regions (documents, programs, etc.). They rarely realize their own vision for the development of the institution, or their own creative plans and ideas in leading and developing it. They possess the necessary economic knowledge and consider themselves good managers of resources. Such leaders rarely support the leadership potential of each teacher, do not overcome bureaucratic approaches to implementing innovative ideas, rarely introduce innovations into methods, technologies, and techniques of instruction or into the upbringing and personal development of students, and do not strive to increase employees' motivation to raise their qualifications.
Leaders of the «fourth type»: are rather rarely able to turn the educational institution into an independent organization and become an entrepreneurial leader, to carry out their own research activity, to organize innovation among teachers, or to achieve creative self-realization. They show problems in the ability to plan their working time rationally. They experience difficulties in finding ways to satisfy their professional ambitions, in using modern information technologies in leadership, and in organizing the effective work of the teaching staff aimed at the development of the individual
student.
Everything described above highlights the importance of studying and developing innovative competence as an instrumental component of a specialist's professionalism.
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