New Competences for Physics Graduates Fostering Innovation and Entrepreneurship

practice
Creativity 4 1 7 5 7 7 1
Teamwork 5 1 4 6 7 9
Table 1: Revisiting the Tuning Competences for enterprise/entrepreneurship education
These skills were identified as appropriate for consideration here since the overall focus of
the survey was upon exploring the extent to which innovation and entrepreneurship skills
are currently fostered, or seen to be important, within physics programmes of the HOPE
partners. Partners, however, had the ability to suggest an additional competency and 8
identified written and oral communication as being important, others were foreign language
skills, organisational skills and perseverance. What the data show overwhelmingly is that
problem solving skills are ranked the most highly followed by the related skills of analysis
and synthesis. The ability to apply knowledge and learn individually (life‐long learning) were
in the mid‐group, whereas creativity and teamwork ranked last overall. This is somewhat at
odds with an innovation and entrepreneurship agenda where creativity is key and
developments often take place through team based activities. As this implies these skills
(creativity and teamwork) are not ranked highly, this has implications upon the extent of the
focus afforded upon their development through the undergraduate curriculum.
Comparisons with rankings (and even listings) of competences in Tuning are fraught with
difficulties and are rather futile. There are several reasons for this. Tuning was a type of
project, very different from HOPE. It involved discussions and investigations spread over
many years and with many different aspects and categorizations of students and
competences. Also the number of respondents to questionnaires was much greater. Thus, in
surveys of the views of academics, typically 20 academics per university responded, and for
alumni typically 40 to 50 per university responded. These numbers are much larger than
those in HOPE. But it is noticeable that the present HOPE survey did not show that newer
competences such as innovation and entrepreneurship figure strongly in the minds of those
responding to the questionnaire.
However, it must also be remembered that particular statements defining competences are
subjective and can be interpreted in different ways and so are not very reliable indicators.
Broad categories such as communication, problem solving and teamwork are less subjective
but hide a great deal of detail of what these competences mean in practice. Thus the
statistical uncertainties are in most cases less important than systematic uncertainties and it
is quite inappropriate to quote confidence levels. Only broad‐brush conclusions can be
relied on.
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