Socio-Educational Entrepreneurship Within the Public Sector: Leveraging Teacher-Driven Innovations for Improvement

This chapter presents a model of innovation in the public elementary schooling system by drawing on ongoing work on an “Educational Innovations Bank” in India, which seeks to make available a freely accessible forum for innovative teachers and a grassroots innovations resource for administrators. How do some teachers in government elementary schools, working in contexts of socioeconomic and educational deprivation, achieve their educational goals in spite of facing the same constraints as thousands of other teachers? What lessons do they offer for policy reform? The answers draw on the social entrepreneurship and workplace innovation literature to first locate the incentive for innovation in the social value that socio-educationally entrepreneurial and innovative behavior of teachers creates. Next, an examination is presented of how this social value leads to learning for an identity of competence, which in turn provides an incentive for further educational innovation. Finally, the evidence is presented to argue for policy entrepreneurship and a formal framework to help in the diffusion, adoption, and adaptation of both the enabling innovations that result from socio-educational entrepreneurship and the in-school or in-class educational innovations. Such a “bottom-up,” peer-learning-based approach to innovations that also “improve” provides a unique way of visualizing educational reform in resource-constrained public educational systems.