Thomas Carey, co-Principal Catalyst for WINCan and Executive-in-Residence in the British Columbia Association of Institutes and Universities and the Monash University Faculty of Arts .
Felix Nobis, Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University (our WINCan partner in Melbourne Australia), Work-Integrated Learning coordinator for the Faculty of Arts and project leader for the undergraduate option in Workplace Innovation .
Many of our WINCan project teams are exploring how we can best collaborate with workplace partners on co-development of Specification, Curriculum and Learning Activities for Capability in Workplace Innovation. One of the deliverables in our 2020-22 work plan is an initial Capability specification, which will no doubt evolve further over time.
In this post we’ll review some of the starting points we’re using to get going on these academic-workplace collaborations, on both the Competencies expected – to contribute effectively to innovation in the workplace – and the underlying Capability required to make those contributions (in the workplace and in our graduates' other roles as community members and global citizens).
I. Competency: what you (have demonstrated that you) can do...
As one starting point, here are some employer-driven criteria being used in Australia for a Professional Practice Credential in Innovation (Bachelor's Level):
You have used experience and research to generate novel approaches to improve existing practices, approaches or methods.
You have identified and/or tested new initiatives or breakthrough thinking or practices.
You have articulated the ways in which innovative effort will positively impact organizational performance (e.g., operational or customer outcomes) and quality of work life (e.g., employee engagement and satisfaction)
You have cooperated with others to gather collective intelligence or insights into innovative ideas or practices.
You have reviewed, reflected and reported on innovation project outcomes and processes.
Beyond what employers may request to meet their current workplace needs, from an academic perspective we'd like to add some additional criteria to indicate readiness for a variety of roles and contexts. For example:
You've engaged with workplace innovation in at least two different settings and reflected on the contextual differences re the social processes of innovation. (Typically, one of these settings will be within the academic institution and one will be in an external WIL context: corporate, SME, public sector, social or community innovation.)
You've engaged in at least two different roles for/types of workplace innovation and reflected on their differing perspectives on the social processes of workplace innovation (e.g., roles as " Sponsor User or Prototype Evaluator" in a Design Thinking process; roles in Adaptive Innovation, Design Innovation or Intrapreneurial Innovation)
You've engaged with at least two different innovation practices for a similar task and reflected on their strengths and weaknesses. (E.g., in Design Thinking, when and how to deploy User-Driven Prototyping versus Wizard of Oz Prototyping from the Stanford d.school Design Thinking Bootleg Guide - this raises awareness of how many different ways there are to approach the various tasks in an innovation project, how to choose among them and where and how to expand your repertoire). Of course, nobody should expect to be skilled in all of these unless they are professional designers :).
We probably also want to also include some elements of Responsible Innovation, to ensure graduates can understand and address the impacts of innovation projects from an ethical standpoint. This might be an ideal interdisciplinary offering to be approached from multiple perspectives, e.g., a History instructor might contribute a module with a whole-class simulation like the Rage Against the Machine open educational resource.
Finally, we want Arts and Sciences students to articulate how the Ways of Thinking fostered in their disciplines can contribute distinctive value to innovation projects.
II. Capability: the Skills, Big Picture Knowledge and Mindsets required for a set of related Competencies as listed above + the requisite Experiences to demonstrate and document proficiency in applying - and enhancing - them.
Note that many of the past efforts in this area – in Canada and elsewhere – have focused on the generic Mindsets and transferable Employability Skills which apply in any type or domain of work (e.g., the Conference Board of Canada's General Innovation Skills Aptitude Profile and the European Union-sponsored project for a Framework for Innovation Competencies Development And Assessment). We now recognize that there are Skills and Knowledge specific to innovation projects as well as Mindsets that are particularly important for innovation projects.
III. Design Thinking as an Example of Competency and Capability. The discussion above illustrates how we in higher education can use the Competencies requested by employers as a basis on which to build the Capabilities our graduates need for both current and future jobs. We have a lot of pioneering work to do here overall, but there are starting points like the Design Thinking example above which illustrate how these elements can come together.
IBM, for example, has specified the Competency they would like every IBMer to demonstrate in their version of Design Thinking, for which 150,000 employees to date have been certified – see the IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Field Guide and accompanying learning resources.
We used this Competency specification from one particular employer in a pilot project where students reflected on this employer-specific variant of Design Thinking in comparison to a more generic Capability and the differences in context from this corporate setting and the small-scale social innovation setting of their course project (a social innovation project at the Tsawwassen First Nations Farm School ).
Design Thinking is also a good example of a growing body of research in developing the Capability, e.g., several books in the Springer series on Understanding Innovation contain research studies on teaching and learning Design Thinking. A few of the institutions involved have begun thinking of Design Thinking capability as a graduate attribute; however, they haven't thought about broadening the graduate attributes expected of all learners to include other innovation types and roles and they haven't thought about how our own Teaching and Learning environments can support – and exemplify! – this.