Innovation Skills in Apprentice Training

Abstract

Product and process innovations are of ultimative importance for a long-lasting enterprise competitiveness. Across all branches and services, innovations can be understood as changing the functionality, performance of products, and quality of services including the way they are produced. An important difference between innovations is that of radical versus incremental innovation. Whereas radical innovation is basic and of disruptive character and is based on paradigmatic change of the current technology concept, incremental innovations are of smaller scale and take place concurrently on the basis during work processes. While reflecting on innovation skills for apprentices, it can be stated that incremental innovations could be given into the hands of workers, foremen, and apprentices. Assuming that different in-company training pathways of apprentices are possible, the development of innovation skills toward incremental improvements on product, as well as production processes, could be brought into reality.