Abstract : Innovation in the workplace has been claimed to be a key factor in organizational survival and success. As future workers, university students are a major source of future innovations in organizational settings. Before they enter the labour market, it is in the context of Higher Education that they start developing some of their long-term behaviours, such as innovation behaviours. This study aims to explore the main determinants of university students’ innovation behaviours from a longitudinal perspective. The sample comprised 78 students of Psychology, Management, Fine Arts and Education. Our results show that previous innovation behaviours as freshmen, current levels of autonomy and cognitive demands are positively related with individual innovation among university students. Practical implications regarding how to foster innovation efforts in the context of Higher Education are discussed.
? Measuring Innovation in Education is a pioneering attempt to provide indicators based on existing international datasets.
? This growth is not simply explained by large companies trying to apply their existing technologies to the education sector; a population of small firms have emerged specialising in the development of technological solutions to educational problems and issues.
? Recognising and articulating what constitutes an effective market for education technology and supporting its development in countries where none exists.
? It is important that students have the opportunity to engage with real-world problems in the feld of study in order to have a rich and meaningful learning experience.
? We could consider individual innovation as an active coping strategy which might buffer the detrimental impact of demands that undergraduates face, such as cognitive ones, on their psychological distress, ultimately leading to improved psychological well-being.
? Literature on individual innovation has highlighted the impact of different individual variables and personality traits, such as openness to experience, on innovation behaviour.
• This study was limited in the sense that we only investigated a set of factors that were proposed to be linked to innovation competence and its teaching.
• In education, changes are often proposed outside the schools and then disseminated into them by reformers.
• The OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) provides new data on educational innovation and proposed different ways to collect innovation data in education.
? This period can bring with it a plethora of new demands on undergraduates, which in turn might have a negative influence on their well-being, performance and adjustment.
? In addition, undergraduates, like employees, could use innovation behaviours as an active coping strategy to manage their demands and consequently improve their psychological well-being.
? Personal Relevance is the extent to which the content used in the constructivist learning environment is relevant to students’ everyday out-of-school experiences.
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