The complex, difficult and even unpredictable challenges pervasive in our societies and personal lives, the business interests seeking to leverage innovation, and the imperative of learning for innovation in European policies, have led to the attention of higher education students' innovation competences as future-ready professionals. Therefore, higher education institutions and programmes must consider how they can contribute to developing students' innovation competence, as competence development is one of the critical tasks of all higher education institutions. While numerous research studies have looked at innovation, its emergence and diffusion in organisations (e.g. Zhang & Zhao, 2023), only in the past two decades has attention turned towards individual innovation competence (IIC) in higher education (e.g. Hero et al., 2017). 

Previous research showed that IIC is a complex, multi-dimensional construct (Hero et al., 2017; Marín-García et al., 2013), a generic competence which is relevant to all higher education students, and as such the best way to develop when integrated to higher education programs (Keinanen & Kairisto-Mertanen, 2019). Higher education programs should define, develop and assess students’ innovation competence to meet these expectations. So far, the definitions of innovation competence mainly stem from reviewing theoretical and empirical research on the one hand (e.g. Hero et al., 2017; Watts et al., 2012), and validating measurement tools with experts, outstanding innovators from the world of work, excellent researcher, university teachers, HR experts on the other (Marin-Garcia et al., 2016; Watts et al., 2012). However, introducing a new goal or learning outcome of higher education programs needs to integrate students’ perspectives and interpretations, especially in such cases when the new goal is extremely complex, and there is no single universally agreed interpretation. Students’ perspectives on innovation competence are still less explored in higher education (for exceptions see (Charosky et al., 2022; Ovbiagbonhia et al., 2019). 

The gap between the expectation of developing innovation competence in higher education and the everyday practice and learning experience can be explained by the shortcomings of teaching (Kasule et al., 2015; Ovbiagbonhia et al., 2019), although teachers may acknowledge the relevance of developing students' IIC, they may lack the pedagogical strategies to do so (Ovbiagbonhia et al, 2023). Students can struggle with reflecting on their own progress in IIC or they can underestimate the relevance of specific elements of innovation competence. Furthermore, innovation competence development has been mainly explored in the field of engineering, with other disciplinary contexts receiving less attention. 

Therefore, our research aim is to explore how IIC can be interpreted and developed from the student’s perspective in three different higher education study fields in the Hungarian context. Our research questions are as the follows: (1) How do students from different HE fields understand IIC? (2) What do students from different HE fields think about the relevant areas of IIC? (3) What do students from different HE fields think about how these areas of IIC can be developed? 

A socio-constructivist theoretical perspective was followed in our study, so IIC is understood as the interaction between students and the learning environment within higher education programmes (Edwards-Schachter et al., 2015). Within this framework, IIC working definition was built on the one hand on the 3-stage process of innovative problem discovery, idea generation, and implementation (Ovbiagbonhia et al., 2023) and on the other hand, a five-component model focusing on creativity, critical thinking, initiative, teamwork, and networking (Marin-Garcia et al., 2016). 

In our qualitative study, 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with students who have experience taking part in innovative activities in higher education. They were purposively selected from the field of arts and design (n=9), education (n=9), and engineering (n=8) across bachelor’s, master’s and PhD levels through the recommendation of program directors, teachers and self-application. Students from the three disciplinary fields were coming from three well-known and recognized universities located in the Hungarian capital. The interview protocol was developed in a way to explore both students’ own self-initiated interpretation and the reflection on a model of innovation competence. Therefore, the research tool consists of three main parts: the first explores student’s own interpretation of innovation competence, the second reflects on statements adapted from the FINCODA questionnaire (Marin-Garcia et al., 2016) which developed a five-component model focusing on creativity, critical thinking, initiative, teamwork, and networking. In this part, students had to interpret and explain how relevant those competence areas are to benefit innovative practice in their professional field. The last part of the instrument is focusing on those elements of innovation competence which are the most or least developed in the specific study field. The interviews last between 45 minutes to 2 hours with an average of 90 minutes and was recorded in MS Teams. The research study was granted an ethical permission. In the data analysis process a conventional qualitative content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) was conducted for identifying special interpretations of IIC. The codes were developed in an inductive way, described by low-inference approach to minimize interpretation bias, and grouped to clusters in the second phase. The transcriptions were analysed by two researchers who developed codes about the areas of IIC separately which was followed by a consensus coding approach where researchers discussed their codes until agreement was reached. For the analysis, Atlas.ti 8.0 was used.

The results show that students generally connected IIC to openness, creativity, problem solving and having professional expertise in the field, but they focused less on implementing new ideas, especially initiating new ideas was less relevant to them in higher education institutions. Teamwork as a key dimension of IIC was found to be the most relevant to all students. In interpreting IIC, differences across study fields were more relevant than across study levels. Students from arts and design highlighted the values that innovation competence can bring (e.g. sustainability) and had a critical view on innovation. Students from educational sciences understood IIC as mainly being adaptive to the ongoing changes of the circumstances and diverse stakeholders’ perspectives. Engineering students highlighted the capabilities for new and effective problem solving as being innovative in their field. One of the most diversly interpreted parts of innovation competence, was ‘bringing up new ideas’, from emphasising originality to focusing on the creative combination of existing practices. All in all, interpreting individual innovation competence had different emphases related to study fields as the professional learning may vary by the different fields according to signature pedagogy (Shulman, 2005). Regarding innovation competence development, students perceived the areas connected to creativity were the least and those connected to teamwork were the most easily developed in HE programmes. The study is limited by its relatively small sample size and student’s challenges in identifying clearly innovative learning activities in their experiences. Nonetheless, it contributes to a more evidence-informed design of curriculum and pedagogical approaches dedicated to developing innovation competence in different study fields, also it offers insights for strengthening constructive alignment within HE programmes.

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