Innovation catalysts

We were delighted to see so many Fashion Management students achieving their level 2 ‘Innovation Catalyst’ award from the Scottish Institute of Enterprise in November.

Innovation skills are recognised as increasingly important amongst graduates and SISA is a new awards programme that helps support and develop these through designated workshops and module accreditation. The Scottish Institute for Enterprise is running the programme in partnership with four of Scotland’s Innovation Centres (Digital Health and Care Institute, CENSIS, The Datalab and the Construction Scotland Innovation Centre).

The students attended a workshop in Glasgow and were tasked with working in multi disciplinary teams to explore the future of our resources – inspired by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The Scottish Government was one of the first to sign up to these goals in 2015 and issued the National Performance Framework as a blueprint for implementing these at a national and local level in 2018.  Well done to our students  – good luck for level 3, we hope you apply!

Scottish innovative student awards

Over the past year, we’ve been working closely with the Scottish Institute for Enterprise (SIE) as part of an accredited Scottish Innovative Student Awards (SISA) programme. RGU is the first university to achieve SISA accreditation and we’re delighted to see so many of our students taking up this opportunity and working through the various levels of the programme.

By completing one of our accredited modules (which span across a number of the courses) and writing a reflective statement, 109 students from our School of Creative and Cultural Business have successfully achieved the first level of this award, making them ‘Future Thinkers’. A further 18 of these students went on to achieve the second level of the award after participating in a multidisciplinary workshop facilitated by Ann Davidson of the SIE and are ‘Innovation Catalysts’.  Incredibly we are now also able to report five Level 3 ‘Innovation Champions’ from the School.  Congratulations to Sofia Bonetti, Monica Genova, Sarah Johnson, Mairi Lowe and Eilidh Mellis!

We look forward to continuing our work with the SIE and seeing other students progress through the SISA programme during their time here at RGU.