References to the “innovation imperative” are frequent in all areas of public policy, including education (OECD, 2016). Innovation is seen increasingly not only as a key for economic growth, development and competitiveness but also as the major source of solving social problems, such as poverty, unsatisfied demands on public health services, delinquency or skills shortages. Most of the literature on innovation in education refers to reforms or major development interventions initiated by public authorities, specialised development agencies or resourceful charities, that is, from the perspectives of educational institutions, to various forms top-down innovations.  The “Innova research” – being implemented by the Research Group on Innovation and Higher Education Research of ELTE University (Budapest) and focusing rather on bottom-up processes – aims at better understanding the emergence of institutional level educational innovations, their spread within the education system and their systemic impact.

The “Innova research” –a four year long project funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund and launched in February 2016 – places the study of educational innovation into the broader framework of general innovation studies (Berg - Östergren, 1979; Fagerberg et al., 2013; Lundvall, 2013) and research on public sector innovation (Mulgan - Albury, 2003; Windrum, 2008; Gallouj - Savona, 2010, Crepaldi et al. 2014; De Vries et al, 2014). It builds directly on the work of OECD on the innovation strategy for the education sector (OECD, 2014; 2016) and also on our former work on the Hungarian national education sector innovation strategy (Balázs et al., 2011). It also builds on research on workplace learning and employee-driven innovation (Høyrup, 2012, Evans, 2012):) as well as on earlier research on teacher-led and school-based curriculum innovation and school improvement (Lewy, 1991; Frost et al., 2000, Fraser, 2005; Skilbeck, 2005). The “Innova research” is the follow-up of a previous research project (“ImpAla”), implemented by the same research group, which aimed at exploring the impact mechanisms of EU funded curriculum development interventions on schools and on the classroom level practices of teachers.

In the paper being prepared for the 2017 ECER conference the theoretical-conceptual framework of the Innova research project will be presented together with the first results of a major empirical survey. The theoretical-conceptual framework distinguishes three main perspectives: the innovation as a product, the innovation as a process (with a focus on both the birth and spread of innovations) and the agents creating and adopting innovations (teachers, schools, partners etc.). The main research questions of the “Innova research” are as follows:

• What are the common features of institutional level educational innovations across the subsystems of education, and how do educational innovation processes differ from innovation processes in other sectors?
• What are the main drivers and barriers to the emergence of institutional level educational innovations?
• How do institutional level innovations spread from one place to another, what are the drivers and barriers to the diffusion of bottom-up educational innovations?
• What is the impact of organisational conditions (e.g. adaptive capacities, knowledge intensity, organisational learning) on the innovation capacities and innovation performance of educational units?

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