Effects of entrepreneurial characteristic of school principals on evaluation of educational innovation

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AIM: The Ministry of Education has started extensive efforts to enhance innovation in schools so that staff structure and planning as well as management and scheduling of cultural and educational capacity of schools are better aligned with the aforementioned objective. The goal of the present study is to investigate the entrepreneurial characteristics of educational managers and its effects on the educational innovation. In this study, pragmatism, creativity, risk, challenge seeking, and ambiguity tolerance are considered as characteristics of entrepreneurial characteristics of school principals. METHODS: The research is of applied type, and qualitative and quantitative methods have been used to carry out the research. Our research methodology is causal-comparative and the population includes 100 Isfahan school principals during the educational year of 2014–2015. This study investigates one main hypothesis and four subhypotheses, and other characteristics such as gender, educational background of school principals, and ownership status of schools (being private or state owned) are also examined. For data collection purposes, Characteristics of Iranian Entrepreneurs Questionnaire with a reliability score of 0.94 and a questionnaire for measuring innovation are utilized. Our data analysis phase makes use of the independent samples t-test as well as Pearson's correlation coefficient. RESULT: Our findings indicate that factors such as ownership status of schools and challenge-seeking traits are significantly related to the educational innovation of school organizations. CONCLUSION: Therefore, it is recommended to take steps toward increased decentralization of the educational system and greater consideration of organizational entrepreneurship in the body of education and training organization. Also, it is suggested that having more flexible and dynamic planning allows for better capitalization on personal entrepreneurial characteristics of educational managers.