The skills ontology offers an overview of skills that help researchers encourage or to engage in innovation process in different context. It tries to offer an answer to the question:
-What skills do PhD holders need to successfully engage in innovation processes (regardless of sector or type of innovation) and/or to create impact through the innovation?
The ontology works with the broad inclusive definition of innovation, understanding it as a practical and active implementation of ideas resulting in the concrete IMPACT in societies and, potentially, markets. The core of the skillset included in the ontology, are skills that are crucial for innovation and on the same time they are the basic skills necessary for research profession. PhD´s usually develop those skills through regular academic training but it is necessary to help them reflect, ideally through direct experience, on how to implement those skills outside research context. By including these skills in the centre of the ontology we want to help researchers and potential employers understand, that PhD holders have a skills profile putting them in a very good position to initiate, drive or otherwise support innovations.
The skills included in the ontology focus on three broadly defined stages of innovation process. These are as follows:
-
IDEA (PLANNING): This stage includes the activities leading to generation of new ideas and solution alternatives
-
IMPLEMENTATION: This stage includes activities necessary to transform ideas to a working solution or technology.
-
IMPACT: This stage focuses on spreading of developed solution and its use and/or its adoption by target group or user that result in a desired outcome or change.