Student customized creative education model based on open innovation

As the creative economy has developed, the university has been given an important role of nurturing creative talents that companies desire to have. The most important objective in creative education is to provide a support system and a good environment for fostering creativity. This will help students in obtaining results and profits through experimenting as well as gaining experience in each step of the process in performing innovation by developing their ideas through utilizing self-directed information and knowledge. There are various creative economy-related businesses being conducted in Korea, which have been supported by the government since 2008, the supporting environment has been constructed to utilize the internal and external systems of universities. However, there are a number of cases where supporting projects that are possible to utilize are overlapping each other or support for projects is not available, as these sorts of supporting systems are designed according to the purpose and drawing performances for each business. For this, creating a “student customized innovation model” has been attempted by linking internal and external support for universities with a process of steps from design thinking to commercialization. The education model in universities should be established by balancing the roles and needs of enterprises, universities, and governments. An open innovation based system should be built for students who are being nurtured the university. The research method for this is as follows: First, the research aim was determined by considering the relationship between creative economy and the concept of open innovation. Second, a new model was developed by analyzing and doing case investigation of university convergence education programs that nurtured creativity. Third, this proposed model (CHEESE program (CHEESE Program stands for Creativity Human Emotional Experience Solution Evaluation)) was customized and designed based on the linkages between the creative education programs and open-innovation. Then, the outcomes from the project’s three years test run were analyzed and organized. The development of the model was intended for design-engineering students based on integrating design-engineering thinking and activities in the process of innovation. The main objective of this study was to create a model (CHEESE program) based on the needs-centered activities that students wanted. This model has been restructured by linking the model with internal and external supporting projects of the university. The model has achieved continuous growth for 3 years and the performance has been improved in various aspects, such as patents, competition awards, and exhibition presentations. This project has drawn meaningful results in terms of experiencing the whole process of innovation, from the stage of determining an idea to making a prototype and commercializing it thorough exchanges with the internal and external systems of the university.