6. Identifying Factors Associated with the Survival and Success of Grassroots Educational Innovations

There is a general consensus that education needs for innovation to stay relevant in the modern world, and yet surprisingly little is known about innovation in education. One particularly underexplored area is grassroots innovation, and the reasons behind its success or failure. We present the results from an empirical study that identifies factors associated with success of grassroots educational innovations in a Russian context. We use data about 240 applications to an innovation competition to build a predictive model of projects success. The generalizability of the model was tested on data about another 250 projects (AUC = 0.83). We show that characteristics of a project team play more important role than characteristics of innovation itself. We also discovered that expert evaluation has low predictive power and is inferior to statistical approach. Our study demonstrates the potential power of data-driven approaches to decision making with respect to innovations in education and vulnerability of traditional approaches based on experts’ evaluation.