The Learnovation Open Forum entitled “Removing the barriers to creativity and innovation? Listening to stakeholders voice“, was held on 27 May 2009 in Brussels, gathering the main European networks in the field of innovation and ICT for Education and Training. This event was organised by the Learnovation Roundtable with the support of the European Commission as a contribution to the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, and result in the launch of the “10 imperatives for change”  to make European education and lifelong learning a lever for innovation.

During the event, a list of priorities for action was discussed by more than 90 participants and “10 imperatives for changes” were produced, that will be proposed to relevant EU and national policiy makers and will represent the starting point of a broad societal consultation on the desired future of European education and lifelong learning.

The Learnovation ten imperatives for change, to face the challenge of relevance for European education beyond 2010:

1. Rescue research on education an lifelong learning from a marginal position.
2. Provide more evidence to policy making, but choose indicators that are able to push creativity and innovation, not only conformance.
3. Face openly the issue of relevance of current learning provision: change is urgent.
4. Establish more connections among the different areas of Lifelong Learning.
5. Celebrate and recognise learning achievements.
6. Bring informal learning into the policy spectrum.
7. Enhace the innovation capacity of teacher trainning systems.
8. Help teachers and trainers to recognise and respect the value of informal learning.
9. Encourage all forms of learning workplace.
10. Remember that not all workers are stererotypical knowlegde workers.

The conference counted with the participation of prestigious speakers, such as Ms. Odile Quintin, Director General for Education, Trainnig, Culture, Youth (European Comission), Mr. Roberto Carneiro, former Minister of Education of Portugal (Universidade Católica Portuguesa) and Mr. Karlheinz Brandenburg (Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology), ambassador of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation and one of the fathers of mp3 technology.

The European Commission came to the conclusion that Europe needs to boost its capacity for creativity and innovation for both social and economic reasons. In particular, there is a need for skills and competences that enable people to embrace change as an opportunity and to be open to new ideas in a culturally diverse, knowledge-based society. Education and training are determining factors in this.

The European Year of Creativity and Innovation is proposed as a cross-cutting initiative covering not only education an culture, but also other policy domains such as enterprise, media, research, social and regional policy and rural development. It should include information and awareness-raising campaigns, promotion of good practices, debates, meetings, conferences and promote a wide variety of projects at regional, national and European level.

Master-D would like to support this innovative initiative by presenting this year 2009 two European projects lined in this conclusion.