by Blake Melnick, CEO and Chief Knowledge Officer for the Knowledge Management Institute of Canada
and Allison Davies, Head of Program Development for the Knowledge Management Institute of Canada
Building the Capacity for Innovation amongst Graduates and Employees
For the past few years, our team has been investigating Workplace Innovation defined as “The social process of creating enduring value through the mobilization of ideas in the workplace” and specifically what skills, knowledge, mindsets and experiences lead to innovation capability. From this research, we developed a graphic which reflected our belief that innovation capability lay at the intersection of these key elements: Innovation Skills, Big Picture Knowledge, Innovation Mindsets and Experiential Learning.
Alt text: innovation capability graphic
In order to foster the development of these attributes, we advanced a new theory and model for learning which treats the “Classroom as the Workplace”, where students, regardless of their academic discipline, would work alongside their counterparts in Business and Industry to address authentic, complex and forward looking challenges, which they are motivated to solve, while they are in the classroom, and for which the solutions developed might have a broad, meaningful and measurable societal impact beyond the classroom.
Knowledge Management and Workplace Innovation - Prototype Program #2
Recent research has indicated there is a correlation between organizations’ knowledge management (KM) practices and their capability and capacity for innovation. Those firms with more mature and robust KM practices tend to also have stronger cultures of innovation:
“Effective KM practices can enable and drive creativity, thus stimulating innovation within an organization” (Driving Knowledge Management for Innovation - Conference Board of Canada)
In support of WINCan research and the evolution of our professional practice, we sought to test this correlation in the context of our “Classroom as the Workplace” model, and apply the innovation skills, mindsets and knowledge identified from our research to an authentic challenge of the kind mentioned in the previous blog entry, “KM and Workplace Innovation Design Challenge: How to Ensure Every Canadian has Access to Affordable Housing by 2030”. In essence we wanted to have students learn about innovation while being engaged in the process of innovation.
Program Overview
The knowledge economy requires that organizations remain on a continual trajectory of innovation if they wish to survive and thrive in a world characterized by exponential change. This will require organizations and individuals to think, work and learn differently than they have done in the past.
The traditional approach to education, which treats work, and training and learning as separate activities, is no longer valid. This program integrated learning with work, in real time. The program was designed to have participants solve authentic problems and challenges related to innovation, while they are learning Knowledge Management theory and practices. This effectively gives them the opportunity to translate what they are learning, immediately into practice.
The program emulated how knowledge-centric organizations behave. What participants experience in the program, the level of collaboration, the interplay with multiple technologies and the focus on solving authentic, real world problems, are exactly what knowledge age workers are dealing with in their organizations every day.
The course employed a problem-based approach where students tackle real world, forward looking challenges, which are by their very nature complex and messy. They learned how the application of KM principles, practices, and methodologies can lead to viable solutions to challenges associated with promoting, developing and maintaining cultures of innovation.
Our Design Approach
Beginning with the hypothesis that developing better KM processes and practices would lead to increased innovation capability, and that innovation is an iterative process, we applied the following approach to the program design:
Theoretical Framework
From the perspective of Instructional design, we combined Knowledge Building Principles (KBPs) developed by Scardamalia & Bereiter with the Design Thinking Principles (DT) of Tim Brown of IDEO. The KBPs represented what we believed to be the “Mindset of Innovation” and the DT principles to be a critical “Skill of Innovation”. As this was a challenge-based course, we believed that students needed to understand the challenge problem at a deep level prior to advancing solutions, and they needed the skills and processes necessary translate the KBPs into focused action to drive a viable result(s). The underlying tenant was, students are capable of creating and advancing new knowledge.
Learning Approach
Students would learn about innovation from being engage in the process of innovating with a purpose. As well the students would participate as co-developers of the program.
Authenticity - Challenge Based vs. Case Based
Students were tasked with addressing a forward looking, complex innovation challenge they were motivated to help solve, rather than the typical case study approach (Harvard Model) employed in many MBA programs, where students work on problems, which have already been solved and their results are compared with those of the experts who had solved the problem in the real world.
Agile vs. Structured Approach to Instructional Design
Instead of employing the traditional, structured approach to course design, where instructors and designers attempt to determine what students need to know prior to creating the curriculum, we chose to use an agile development approach similar to what is used in software companies and the gaming industry, where many of the design decisions are made during the development process itself, by creating continuous user feedback loops, allowing developers to make changes according to the evolving needs of the learners.
A library was created within the virtual learning environment containing a host of learner resources, including our research findings around innovation from the Skills Catalyst Grant and KMIC’s KM resources and research studies. Each week of the course began with a Webinar hosted by me along with a panel of guest subject matter experts. All webinars were recorded and then added to the course knowledge base the same day. Recordings also included the Q and A sessions which followed the formal presentations. This provided the students with the option of attending the live webinar and engaging in discourse with the presenters or, if they were unable to attend a particular session, they could view the webinar and the questions in the course knowledge base and comment and build on the questions and comments of their peers. Webinar recordings effectively became permanent knowledge discourse objects.
One of our key learning objectives was for students to be able to immediately translate theory into practice to address the CMHC housing challenge. In support of this objective, we found it necessary to supplement webinars with weekly podcasts, where expert panelists explored sub-topics and questions raised by students either during weekly webinars, from the weekly readings, or from collaborative discourse sessions which took place within the knowledge base. These podcasts also became permanent reference able learning objects within the course knowledge base.
Instructor as an Expert Participant in the Learning Process
In traditional instructor led programs, whether face to face or online, the teacher tends to be either a conveyor of knowledge (sage on the stage) or facilitator (guide on the side). We believe distributed learning environments offer the opportunity for teachers and instructors to be expert participants in the learning process alongside the students, providing context (experience), contributing to discussions, effectively becoming part of the collective effort to advance community knowledge.
Iterative vs. one-off
The KM and Workplace Innovation program was intentionally designed to be iterative rather than a stand alone or one off program. We made this decision for the following reasons:
Successive groups of learners should benefit from the work of their predecessors rather than re-inventing the wheel every time
Innovation is itself an iterative process supported by a knowledge building process which encourages learners to advance knowledge beyond their levels of understanding.
This approach ensures the program remains relevant, current and increasingly more robust with each iteration.
Technology of Use vs. Use of Technology
The decision to use Knowledge Forum 6 (KF6.0) as the learning environment was made because the technology is intentionally designed to support the collaborative knowledge building process we believe is integral to developing the Mindset for Innovation. Unlike other commercial off the shelf collaborative systems, which tend to be feature driven, KF 6.0's learner-centric flexible functionality, allows individual learners to contribute and represent ideas, collaborate with others, and advance knowledge in a myriad of different ways. Learning spaces (views) are configurable and continuously re-configurable by community members as their learning needs evolve.