Resource
Lessons from Piloting an Innovation Toolkit in Further Education
29 January 2026
Innovation offers huge potential to benefit people and society at large. However, participation in innovation remains unequal.
To help address this issue, we worked with a range of delivery, research and policy partners via the “Unlocking Innovative Potential” (UIP) programme. We identified the important role that Further Education (FE) colleges could have in addressing the challenge of lost innovative potential in the UK, as a key setting for equipping underrepresented learners with innovation skills.
In this report, “Lessons from Piloting an Innovation Toolkit in Further Education”, we present findings from a feasibility study conducted by the Innovation Growth Lab, East Kent Colleges Group and external academic partners.
We aimed to tackle a critical evidence gap on “what works” in this area through the use of an RCT by assessing the feasibility of rigorously evaluating,, East Kent Colleges Group’s (EKC Group) ‘Think.Design.Do’ (TDD) toolkit – an online Design Thinking programme designed to equip learners with practical problem-solving, creativity, and iteration skills.
The main findings show that:
- Interviews indicated that learners responded positively to the TDD toolkit, reporting benefits with problem-solving skills and confidence.
- There are significant structural hurdles to introducing new programmes and data collection processes in FE settings, particularly at speed and scale. Specifically, competing demands on teacher time and curriculum pressures were identified as crucial factors
- At this stage, the potential of the pilot study to scale up to a full RCT was low, due to practical barriers. However, the pilot identified the challenges to be overcome and also provided useful evidence to inform further development of the toolkit.
