Scardamalia, M. 2003. Presentation at the 2003 IKIT Summer Institute: Beyond Best Practice.

What is a Barrier-Breaking Innovation?

A barrier-breaking innovation makes possible something that was widely thought to be impossible before. There are many worthwhile innovations in education and knowledge work that do not have that character—adopting a new technology, finding a novel use for existing technology, designing an exciting new learning activity, improving on an existing practice—but the IKIT Scholars program is aimed at encouraging those rarer innovations that do break barriers. In particular, it is aimed at overcoming barriers to knowledge building in education and organizations.

Some of the common barriers to knowledge building are these:

Age barriers:
“They’re too young...”
“They’re too old... [to do such and such].”

Motivational barriers:
“This may be fine for people who are highly motivated, but for the average [student, worker]....”

Aptitude and learning style barriers:
“This is only for the gifted... creative... well-educated....”--for special types of learners, for special types of intelligences, not.....

Socio-economic barriers:
“This is only for certain classes of people, not...”

Cultural/national/ethnic barriers:
“This may work in [Toronto, noncompetitive cultures, different societies] but not in...”

Difficulty and complexity barriers:
“It’s too hard...” “Beyond their level.”
“I don’t fully understand it myself.”
“Too abstract.”

Regulations and accountability barriers:
“I’d like to, but we’re required by [our board, the public, my boss]...”
“This doesn’t fit with the guidelines.”

Priority barriers:
“Knowledge building is valuable, but we have to give first priority to
[skills, meeting deadlines, mastering essential content, etc.]”

Domain and context barriers:
“This may work in... [science, health care, schools, our design department] but not in... [history, customer service, sales]...

Time barriers:
“Our work is fast-paced. We’re too busy with more urgent matters to
deal with knowledge building.”

Sufficing barriers:
“We are doing fine with our current methods. We just need to tweak those a bit.”

Risk barriers:
“We need to get our scores and production up first, and then we will be ready for something new“
“Let’s stick with the tried-and-true and wait for more data before we make changes.”

Doing versus thinking barriers.
“We are not the idea/design people, we are the producers.”

Barrier-breaking is necessarily risky. (If success of a project is certain, it probably isn’t attacking a real barrier.) The IKIT Scholars program aims to support promising efforts to solve significant problems. Efforts that fall short may still contribute to overall advancement, if they provide “improvable ideas” (see Knowledge Building Principles). However, instead of “I tried it and it didn’t work” reports, we look for “It was harder than I expected; here’s what we had to do to succeed.”