TEDx Speaker David Harkin: ‘It is crucial to make our schools more innovative’

This year’s IPSEF Middle East brings together schools and investors to engage with world class operators and suppliers, and discuss the current issues and trends in the private education sector.

In an exclusive interview with Edarabia.com, David Harkin, Founder of 7 billion ideas, shares his thoughts on promoting three key skills – curiosity, creativity, and innovation – and how they help schools revolutionize learning.

1. Can you tell us more about your session at IPSEF?

My session at IPSEF is going to be about building a world class school and what we can learn from the theory of marginal gains. I will introduce myself and give the history of 7 billion ideas, which has grown over the last 7 academic years working with 100,000 students all around the world in approximately 500 schools. Predominantly, our work is around entrepreneurship in education and innovation in education. I will then be introducing the concept of marginal gains, but also what we believe a world-class school looks like. That’s a school which aspires to improve in everything it does, both academic and non-academic. For me, it’s a mentality shift. It’s not about necessarily having the deepest pockets and the biggest budget; it’s about having a mentality that everyone relentlessly tries to innovate on a day to day basis. I’ll be touching on the theory of world class, what I understand about it and the opportunities that building an environment that actually seeks and acts on marginal gains can have on an organization. Finally, I’ll be giving some tips to the leaders and those participants about what they can do immediately when they go back to their schools to embrace a world class mentality across the entire organization.

2. How did your corporate background inspire you?

Prior to starting 7 billion ideas, I was at IBM on the Director’s path and thoroughly enjoying my time in the tech industry. But back in 2011/2012, I realized that the larger the organization was, the harder it was for ideas to be heard. Ideas to save money, to make money, improve productivity and improve client or indeed employee satisfaction. When we came up with the idea of 7 billion ideas, an idea which was generated around a group of friends talking and realizing that the planet’s population of 7 billion people out there and we’re all doing the same thing, talking about ideas but very rarely acting on them, it inspired me to get going. I felt we could create through 7 billion ideas, an organization that could inspire people to act on their ideas through our work in education, but more importantly go and work with SMEs, large organizations and schools, and help them to embrace relentless innovation, so that people, employees, whether it’s their first day or last day, across the entire spectrum could actually act on their ideas. So, my corporate background was a big influence on the business today.

3. In what ways is the 7 billion ideas concept revolutionary?

7 billion ideas is a unique company that works in the education and corporate space. With regards to education, we work in every single learning environment from working with the top international (delete) private schools in the world to some of the most challenged schools in inner cities to young offenders. In regards to what we do in the corporate space, it’s our approach which is revolutionary and very different. At the heart of our work is a product called Spark – a piece of software – but it’s our approach and our model of relentless innovation which we help embed into an organization. That’s what makes us different, so it’s not just a one-off, it’s helping an environment change its culture so that they’re innovating on a day to day basis. And that takes a long time; you have to consider how you can make an environment fertile for a change in how it innovates, but also how you can seek those marginal gains on a daily basis.

4. Why is it important to promote curiosity, creativity and innovation within schools?

It is absolutely vital that we promote curiosity, creativity, and innovation within schools. In 2030, 85% of the jobs which will be in the economy don’t exist yet, but I can guarantee that one of the key skills that will be needed is creativity so that has to be the basis of the curriculum of every school, in our opinion. That’s one big reason.

Secondly, the rise of the self-employed entrepreneur is tipping and exceeding 15% in some economies in the world, and in the UK that means there is over 4.5 million entrepreneurs working on a day to day basis, so we have to help those entrepreneurs be more curious, creative and innovative in what they do because they are the bedrock of the economy. But, there’s also that fascination that is important to talk about – 77% of teenagers say they would like to start a business but don’t necessarily know the steps they need to take in order to do it. So, there’s lots of reasons why it’s absolutely crucial from a student perspective, but also a teacher perspective, to make our schools more innovative. We need to find ways of saving money, making money, being more productive because time is the biggest problem in education, but then also improving what’s happening both inside and outside of the classroom. And the tried and tested ways of innovating education over the last 100 years haven’t really worked. Most innovation is top down; it isn’t bottom up. Schools believe that a suggestion box, or open-door policy or regular think tank session is enough – it isn’t enough, we have to change our mindset completely, we have to be innovating on a day to day basis.