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 .
Andrew Maxwell is Associate Professor and Bergeron Chair in Technology Entrepreneurship at York University’s Lassonde School of Engineering. Andrew was Lassonde’s Project Director for the 2018-19 Ontario Skills Catalyst project hosted by York.
Blake Melnick is co-Principal Catalyst for WINCan and Chief Executive Officer/Chief Knowledge Officer of the Knowledge Management Institute of Canada.
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new project, Developing an Innovation-Enabled Workforce for Ontario, hosted by York University’s Lassonde School of Engineering and supported in part by the Skills Catalyst Fund of the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities.
Academic Partners: While we plan to deploy our initial results in academic programs at York University, the following Academic Partners will be working with us to identify additional opportunities to pilot the development of workplace innovation capability in higher education:
Eileen de Courcy, Associate Vice-President, Teaching and Learning; Humber College
Richard Wiggers, Associate Dean of Liberal Studies; Mohawk College
David Potter, Associate Professor, Booth School of Engineering; McMaster University
Vickie Lowes, Manager – Science Career & Co-operative Education; McMaster University
Tania Del Matto, Greenhouse Innovation Lab Director; St. Paul’s University College, U. of Waterloo
Workplace Partners: Our leadership team has multiple long-term strategic relationships with a broad range of organizations; pan-Canadian innovation leaders from the following Ontario-based organizations have agreed to serve as the initial Workplace Partners in this project:
Corporate sector: Hatch Engineering (Mississauga), IBM Canada (Markham), Shopify (Ottawa)
Public sector: Bank of Canada – Banque du Canada (Ottawa), Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (Ottawa), Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (Guelph)
In addition to its role as lead Academic Partner, York University will also be joining the project as a Workplace Partner, to incorporate our results into ongoing Service Transformation projects within the Office of the Vice-President, Finance and Administration (undertaken as part of York’s participation in the international UniForum collaboration to benchmark and optimize university support services).
Project Plan
The short turn-around time between the announcement of the Skills Catalyst Fund program and the date to submit proposals – over the Christmas/New Year break – prevented us from collaborative development of a full Project Plan with our partners. As project leaders, we wanted to ensure that we could “build meaningful partnerships that…better…prepare students, jobseekers, and incumbent workers for in-demand jobs” (one of the stated goals of the Skills Catalyst Fund program).
Accordingly, we outlined in the proposal one possible scenario of activities, in which Stage 1 consists of Partnership Development activities to fully engage all the partners in project planning, culminating in a June 2018 Partnership Meeting hosted at York in which the remaining Stages of work to Mar 31 2019 will come into focus.
To illustrate some of the possibilities for the partners to consider, here is the list of scenario activities included in the (successful!) grant proposal, which we outline in more detail below:
Collaborate on shared descriptions and specifications for workplace innovation capability
Share and co-create exemplary resources and practices to develop innovation capability
Co-operate across sectors to support and leverage capability development in higher ed
Plan joint activities to scale up cross-sector collaboration for workplace innovation capability
Collaborate on Shared Descriptions and Specifications for Workplace Innovation Capability
We plan to initially explore our shared understandings of the Capability required to engage effectively with workplace innovation. We will then collectively decide what Skills, Knowledge, Mindsets and Experiential Learning opportunities are required in our higher education and workplace contexts and where to focus our efforts on joint resources to support the development of a more innovative workforce for Ontario.
Share and co-create exemplary resources and practices to develop innovation capability
One key part of our plan is academic-workplace collaboration on “innovative ideas and solutions that strengthen education [and] training”, by co-creating adaptable Learning Resources to develop the specified capability for workplace innovation. The outputs from this work may include overall Learning Designs, specific Learning Activities and Assessments for learners, and accompanying Support Resources for learners and instructors.
Priorities for these Outputs will be co-developed earlier in the project, and they are intended to be adaptable by both workplace and academic partners. Our plan is to adapt methods from Agile Learning Design to create approaches that foster this re-use and adaptation; these initial design and development for cross-sector adaptability are expected to be one of the key results from our project.
Co-operate across sectors to support and leverage capability development in higher education
The co-developed Outputs outlined above must “provide the supports skills, tools, opportunities, and experiences learners, jobseekers, workers, and employers need to thrive in the current and future workforce” (quoting again from the Skills Catalyst Fund requirements). We will initially evaluate the Outcomes for learners in two Lassonde courses, each involving 250 students. Our workplace and academic partners will be supported in customizing and evaluating these resources for their contexts, using existing organizational teams and methods. The core project team will iteratively revise the Specification and Resources to reflect Partner feedback.
Plan joint activities to scale up cross-sector collaboration for workplace innovation capability
Our emerging Partnership is a vital step toward the Skills Catalyst Fund goal to “help all Ontarians…to enter, adapt to, and remain in a changing workforce”. To extend our project impacts – and to build a base for an ongoing collaboration to develop a globally exemplary Innovation-Enabled Workforce for Ontario, throughout the project will be reaching out to additional academic institutions, to workplace partners in other sectors (e.g., Social/Community Innovation) and to projects beyond Ontario with whom we can exchange ideas and resource for mutual advantage.
A key driver for these activities will be the advice of our Developmental Evaluation team from Cathexis Consulting, an Ontario leader in “program evaluations that make a difference”. They will be ‘embedded’ with all project activities to assess Partnership Development, including emerging revisions in the project Workplan.