THE TRANSFORMATION OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION IN THE CONTEXT OF INNOVATIONS

The paper considers the changes in the structure of the educational environment of a technical university caused by the development of partnership of a university, business, and the state. The concept of triple helix serves as a driver of the development of technical education and promotes the formation of administrative, communicative and business competencies of new-style engineers. The author gives a brief analysis of changes taking place today in a technical university that allows speaking about the creation of an appropriate environment for the training of professionally qualified new-generation engineers able both to generate ideas and bring them up to commercialization. The paper shows that in the conditions of integrative changes, the requirements to the technical university graduates became more complicated and, in the conditions of market competition, should conform to the challenges of new time, therefore, empowering teachers to search for the ways of involving future engineers in the real research, business, and innovative activity. The successfulness of behavior of innovative processes in technical education depends largely on teaching staff, their value-based attitude to the happening changes. Subsequently, the professional and educational activity of a teacher in the conditions of integrative changes should be carried out at a qualitatively different level and have interdisciplinary nature. All of these things cause the necessity in the support of a technical university teacher aimed at the improvement of his or her teaching competence, in the expansion of the range of teacher’s professional activities through the introduction of innovative strategies, technologies and ways of training engineers in accordance with the needs of a real economy sector.