The complexity of innovation under uncertainty and undergoing the digital transformation of society requires an ultimate ability to embrace the unknown, transform the contexts and solutions, make sense, and deliver value with societal and environmental impact from those who engage in an innovation journey in the 21st century. However, the competence development models, and even so practices, rely on models that have been developed a few decades ago and lack an in-depth integration of skills that would allow the innovator to navigate the uncertainty with greater creativity and confidence. Both the academic and the business environments must reinvent themselves and adopt a more responsible and desirable approach to innovation (Owen, Bessant, et al., 2013), embracing sustainability, inclusion, and societal risks, but also frugal and circular innovation while embracing the challenge of digital transformation inducing the new logic of work, and a societal organization at large. To progressively develop a collective commitment of care for the future and to identify innovation targets in a more ethical, inclusive, and equitable manner, innovation managers need to see “the big picture” and develop new skills and competencies such as creativity, critical thinking, curiosity but also mindfulness, empathy, emotional engagement, and a greater awareness and sensibility towards environment and all stakeholders of their ecosystem. The potential success considering the context of the digital transformation era lies in the mix of these skills, abilities, and orientations (Dabrowska and Podmetina, 2017; Ritala et al., 2021) consequently the combination of skills needs to be reconsidered, adapted or even reinvented.

In the innovation management literature, the attention is rarely focused on skills (Chiarello et al., 2021; Kim and Lee, 2022; Membrillo-Hernández et al., 2021), although the rapid technological (and in particular the AI development) and sustainable changes highlight the alarming necessity for innovators and creative thinkers to develop a more holistic and interdisciplinary approach to innovation and entrepreneurship (Dobson and Walmsley, 2021). Unfortunately, education practices struggle to equip the students with the set of skills to act under the unknown, deal with extreme complexity, ambiguity (Schleicher, 2018) and wicked problem solving (Von Thienen et al., 2014). Integrating Art - and all artistic experimentations from visual arts, to theater, dance, music, photography, design…- could help to focus on new, different, unconventional and creative skills that are lacking in the current approach of innovation and education (Berthinier-Poncet et al., 2022). The integration of Arts in the industrial environment could also fill the need of organizations to engage in new, more spontaneous, sustainable and novel ways of managing and innovating (Carlucci and Schiuma, 2018). The artistic process allows for a different kind of understanding regarding approach to creativity, one that emphasizes self-generation, metacognition, and thematic coherence.

The relatively recent STEAM education approach -  Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math’s - offers a major step in the development of these expected new skills as it emphasizes experiential and transversal learning, transdisciplinary and project-based work stimulating autonomy, creativity and self-control in students (Chien and Chu, 2018; Conde-González et al., 2021). This development is part of the recent trend towards transformative learning (Clark and Wilson, 1991; Watkins et al., 2012) that represents a profound shift in an individual's perspective, beliefs, and assumptions, leading to a more inclusive and critically reflective worldview (Mezirow, 1997). The significant emphasis is placed on skills and competencies derived from Arts.

In this paper we study (RQ) what new skill sets are essential for future innovators and entrepreneurs’ competence development from industry and academia perspective and propose an Arts-driven competence model for future innovators and entrepreneurs.

This research aimed at empirical validation and testing of the theoretical competence model for innovation and entrepreneurship. The survey strategy was chosen to analyze the needs and openness of companies regarding transdisciplinary STEAM skills, the importance of different sets of skills and to study the overall awareness and application of the STEAM practices in European organizations, industry, and academia. The questionnaire was developed aiming at industry, academia, and policy makers respondents. In this questionnaire we provided respondents with literature-based skill sets and asked them to evaluate the importance of skills and arts-based approaches in business and education, organizational needs and requirements for new skills and competencies development to understand the roles of future innovation specialists with 21st century and STEAM skills. To assess the importance of different soft, artistic, and unconventional skills in industry and academia we applied a list of skills elaborated after several literature review rounds, experts’ validations and focus group interviews and workshops. In addition, we controlled for industry vs academia background. The online survey was launched at the end of 2022 through an emailing campaign and social networks. Due to social network coverage in total, we have responses from 18 countries. The average response rate was about 30 %, but this varied between countries. After cleaning the sample and removing incomplete questionnaires, the final number of responses accepted for further analysis was 138. 56 respondents are from industry (40,6%), 73 from academia (52,9%) and 9 policy makers (6,5%). The academic respondents are full professors (17,8%), associate professors (15,1%), lecturers (11%), researchers (24,6%), and others (31,5%), who focus on teaching STEM subjects (23,3%), arts (4,1%), business and innovation management (53,4%), social sciences (9,6%) and other disciplines (9,6%). Academic respondents come from France, Finland, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, etc. Industry respondents mostly work on B2B markets (73,2%), 35,7% work on B2C markets and 16,1% on others. Industry represents companies from Wales, France, Canada, Ireland, Lithuania, Germany, etc. The following sectors are most common among respondents: Commercial & Professional Services (12,5%), Software, telecommunication, and services (10,6%), Transportation and Automobiles (8,9%), and etc. To control for possible common method bias, we implemented Harman’s single factor test (Podsakoff and Organ, 1986).

Arts-driven competence model represents three outer layers of competencies (intra and interpersonal competency; innovative problem solving embracing unconventional thinking styles; and emotional and innovative cognition competency embracing artistic skills), which consist of 8 inner layers of competencies built on the skill set of 34 STEAM skills. This theory and data-based model is believed to be essential for developing skills for innovation professionals and entrepreneurs aiming at achieving competitive advantage in product, process, and service innovation and at mastering the challenges of digitalization and sustainability. Theory based Arts-driven competence model added new layers on top of traditional STEM skills for innovation professionals, managers, and entrepreneurs such as artistic skills, soft skills and unconventional thinking skills supporting better creativity on individual and organizational levels.

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