Farhad Dastur is a faculty member and Board member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the founder of Connecting Minds: Canada’s undergraduate research conference in psychology, and a former Teaching Fellow in KPU’s Teaching and Learning Commons.
Thomas Carey is 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 .
Other posts in this series have outlined the motivation behind our pilot projects in developing workplace innovation capability within higher education and examples projects with Innovation Adaptation and Design Thinking. We also recently explored a pilot project with several potential workplace partners in our region, through the Innovation Committee of the local Chamber of Commerce. The potential SME (Small and Medium-size Enterprises) workplace partners expressed strong interest in a pilot project along these lines.
Workplace Innovation was presented as an area where students could work with external partners to mobilize research evidence in particular workplace contexts – for example in particular work domains such as Construction and Health Care or in a particular context such as a family-owned firm or other type of SMEs. This was intended to expose students to an innovation project they did not initiate but to which they could bring distinctive value by adding a capability the existing team could not deploy.
One of the authors led a senior elective course on Research Topics in Psychology which could be tailored to specific areas. In this offering, the course title was, Psychology, Design and Workplace Innovation. The course topics were structured to include both Workplace Innovation and Human-Centred Design – including Design Thinking – partly to link these topics in the students’ minds and partly to provide a broader range of knowledge areas where students could bring value to external workplace partners. A key element of the student workload was a capstone project where the evidence from psychological research in one or both of these areas could be applied to a setting external to the campus environment.
What we learned: to our delight, about half the students in the class chose to focus their capstone projects on Workplace Innovation rather than the Human-Centred Design research topics also examined in the course unit. We had intended to them return to the SME workplaces who had indicated interest in our initial explorations.
However, all of these students elected to develop their own projects within their own part-time workplaces rather than pursue the default opportunities we had planned. There were particular characteristics of the student experience at the host university which made this student-directed pivot toward the proactive innovation context more appealing (and less of a leap of faith).
Catalysts for Workplace Innovation in students’ part-time workplaces: At the university hosting the Special Topics in Psychology course unit, most students commute from home and work part-time – up to 75% in some Faculties or Schools. For many institutional purposes, this was regarded as a liability because it restricted on-campus activities while not often being career-related.
However, the students who undertook a capstone Workplace Innovation project for Special Topics in Psychology found their part-time employment to be an advantage – providing a natural work-integrated learning site for them to engage with workplace innovation. For some students, the course experience prompted them to identify a need within their workplaces. Other students noted that the course gave them an opportunity to take initiative in proposing a Workplace Innovation which had already been on their minds but on which they held back because they felt constrained by their position as junior employees.
The following capstone projects illustrate the variety and impact of these work-integrated learning experiences in workplace innovation:
Redesigned the cleaning process and invented a new cleaning tray for camshafts at an Auto Parts Corporation
Designed and implemented a new training interface for customer service representatives at a Major Financial Institution
Designed and implemented a bot to answer frequently asked questions for the university-wide Student Association
Designed and implemented an employee scheduling application for a Grocery Store Chain
Designed and developed a new job role and position for a Major North American Retail Fashion company
Prototyped a new online system that would allow front-line staff to communicate with managers at a local restaurant chain
What (else) we learned: Because we had not foreseen the availability and appeal of these opportunities, we had not prepared for these new work-integrated learning contexts, e.g., mentoring and supporting workplace proctors, complementary assessments from academic and workplace perspectives, and IP rights. Another downside of this context shift was that each of these projects was undertaken by an individual student rather than a student team as in our other Design Thinking pilot cited in a previous pos—although, in principle, there could have been co-design with workplace colleagues, none of the student project reports mentioned this as an important factor.
These issues will have to be addressed if we are to take full advantage of students’ part-time work at sites where they can engage with workplace innovation and potentially take more initiative within this external-but-familiar environment. We will be incorporating program elements to address these needs in our next round of work-integrated learning pilot projects.