3 Lessons for enabling innovation in education

By MIT Jameel World Education Lab

Innovation pipelines — a set of clustered activities that enable innovative ideas to develop into real-world impact — is a central topic being explored this year by the MIT Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), part of MIT Open Learning, and its member institutions.

Kathleen Burke, J-WEL postdoctoral associate for global engagement, examines the innovation pipelines built by Riga Technical University (RTU) and Riga Business School (RBS) in collaboration with J-WEL. Burke spoke with Claudio Rivera, director of academic affairs and assistant professor in leadership at RBS and a longstanding member of the J-WEL community. Rivera has used his own ecosystem and collaborations to foster innovation at RBS. He shared the hard-earned lessons from his work, as well as reflections on the role of RBS in educational innovation, drawing connections between his work and the national ecosystem of educational transformation, entrepreneurial development, and industry innovation in Latvia.

Lesson 1: Understand people

Rivera views the innovation pipeline as “a living set of relationships and interactions between individuals, organizations, ecosystems, and places.” Rivera values the experience of relating to different people through his work. Trained in Organizational Psychology and Leadership, Rivera has continued to focus his work on understanding the human motivations driving behavior.

“What I bring from Organizational Behavior or Psychology and Leadership is a background of understanding people,” Rivera says. “That is, at the end of the day, what it is all about — working with people and understanding them, and the most difficult part is to influence people in a good way and to keep them motivated in difficult projects and processes…keeping everyone together and understanding human beings.”

From Rivera’s perspective, contextual knowledge is highly important in fostering productive professional relationships across cultures. Originally from Buenos Aires, Rivera established his career in Latvia and has seen the value of multicultural experience first hand. Rivera emphasized how understanding people has helped to cement his “roots” in the place, commenting that “to truly understand education, you must be immersed in it — not just as an academic, but by engaging with students and faculty on the ground…Until you are there and you feel the music of what happens there, you really don’t know. And I think MIT understands this.”

For instance, the establishment of the Education Innovation Laboratory at RBS required, according to Rivera, “a critical mass of support, the network, the community, and experience to make it happen.” He learned that this broad support was needed to push beyond one-dimensional training that is still common in the educational system.

By directing attention to understanding people, Rivera continues to extend his network through thought leadership on the role of universities in AI-driven innovation ecosystems, leading to a recent publication with support from the Asia Europe Foundation. In his own work, often delivering keynote speeches at various settings in academia, industry, and government, Rivera embodies the idea that innovation pipelines are inherently human-centered.

Lesson 2: Don’t be afraid to invite all stakeholders

Rivera is interested in weaving together service, entrepreneurship, and innovation. He has been traversing the education, policy and business sectors in multiple roles. Within RBS alone, Rivera serves as director of academic affairs, strategic advisor in educational innovation, and assistant professor in leadership. Outside of academia, Rivera is also head of education for the Foreign Investors Council and member of the Human Capital Commission of the Republic of Latvia, in addition to leading the RTU and J-WEL collaboration.

Rivera’s openness to different types of roles beyond traditional academic duties of research and teaching has shaped his views on innovation. He describes his duty to serve as “an integrator of different stakeholders to bring new ideas to fruition.”

Rivera sees the university as a hub for innovations to take shape: “Yes, we have buildings, research centers, programs, grants, committees, learning management systems…but any university is simply an encounter of minds, young and old, from all disciplines, searching together for answers to big and small questions,” he says.

Rivera emphasized that the Education Innovation Lab was designed for different stakeholders to collaborate on issues related to education, skills development, and knowledge commercialization. It came down to connecting people from RBS, RTU, the Ministry of Education, and J-WEL, and reaching out to wider university networks:

“It is one hub where we put together very important stakeholders of the system, the government, companies, universities, and non-governmental organizations” he says. “We put them together in different types of projects, and we have the capacity to help them to understand each other and to draft and create innovative projects together, especially those connected to education or commercialization of science, or with policy.”

One benefit of inviting all stakeholders into the Lab, from Rivera’s perspective, was the possibility of aligning innovation projects with areas of strategic importance to the university, industry and the Latvian government. Eventually, Rivera began to see how collaboration could create “a joint value chain where all stakeholders share a common value proposition.” He learned how global collaborations can “make the world smaller.”

Lesson 3: Combining persistence and patience

Another lesson for Rivera was to have persistence over the course of innovation activities and to be patient with the process. One way to map activities to innovation outputs was to set both short-term and long-term goals across the stakeholder network. According to Rivera, goals can be aligned in different increments: “The Lab aimed to increase visibility for Latvian students and companies in the short term, and to bolster the competitiveness of small and medium enterprises — and Latvia as a whole — in the long term.”

The Strategic Education Innovation Project Support Program, a primary activity of the Education Innovation Lab, put this approach into practice. Rivera explained that this process was also about boosting morale through interim milestones and goal assessments. Input from mentors aimed to monitor progress and process — urging teams to remember goals and ground the work in reality, especially considering the social implications of today’s technologies. Rivera reflected upon how the project structure narrowed the “borders” between departments, faculties, and universities, creating core connections between students, faculty members and societies.

“It might take between two to five years from the moment you have an idea to do something that is really systemic until the moment you start to see the thing happening at an interesting level,” says Rivera. “And during those years, most of the investment has to be on significant, intelligent networking.”

Before making this work happen, Rivera spent years cultivating his own network through his work with the Latvian government and industrial sector to carry out higher educational reform. In 2023, the J-WEL collaboration with RTU amplified these efforts, as seen in the Leadership Development Program, which was able to reach over 70 Latvian education, government, and business leaders.

Rivera advised assembling a core group of five to ten individuals and really investing in those relationships. “Then you can do something together,” he says. “The pipeline of innovation implies alignment of goals between the different stakeholders…the alignment between MIT and RBS has been decisive in shaping the narrative about innovation.”

This piece is an excerpt from an article originally published in J-WEL’s Ideas. It has been edited for length and clarity.

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