Partnering with Industry

Construct Works at the Nexus of Schools, Industry, Community, and Funders

We stand for equity in education. Our efforts focus on providing every student with the skills they need to thrive today and tomorrow. Our grant dollars fill the early innovation funding gap and we aspire to create opportunities for investment as new education models demonstrate impact and generate demand by students, teachers, principals, and district leaders.

Innovate Oregon

Innovate Initiatives  

To change the economic future for our preK-16 graduates and create the talented workforce we need for the 21st century economy we are leveraging the intersection of Agile Learning with Design Thinking. This is how we begin to break down the silos between education, communities, and industry, and close the gap between education and employment in the age of innovation.

AGILE LEARNING and Design thinking

Agile Development and Agile Management are the standard methods for innovation being used across industry sectors. Agile, at its core, is an experience of fast iterative learning with clear purpose but often with no clear path to a solution. Our traditional model of education was based on the industrial economy's paradigm of the production line. A new paradigm is needed for education in the innovation economy. 

Design Thinking, a creative collaborative problem solving method, also using rapid cycles of iteration, has become an industry standard for uncovering new and novel solutions to problems. Design Thinking offers a human centered approach and is used to address complex seemingly intractable problems. Design Thinking methods have gained increased traction in education as a pedagogical approach to building real world problem solving experiences for students and as a method for disrupting system constraints that impede learning.

An inside/outside strategy 

Construct and Innovate Oregon are combining efforts to provide a powerful set of offerings that fuel the redesign of education for the innovation economy.

Innovate Initiatives are unfolding regionally across Oregon

We believe that by changing the learning experience for students in schools and systematically connecting those experiences to relevant real world learning they are accessing outside of schools a new mindset will form around passion and purpose. This will promote agile, flexible learners, that are self directed and inspired to use school as a powerful launch pad to success in a rapidly changing world.

Innovate Initiatives happen regionally connecting schools, districts, industry, higher education institutions, and community in authentic learning experiences throughout preK-16.  

Collaboratively we bring a toolkit of service to a region: make-a-thons, School Retool, Breakaway, digital storytelling, exhibitions of learning: student to community, industry supported design challenges, business mentors, and education leaders roundtable