Farhad Dastur, faculty and Board member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Director of KPU’s Virtual Reality Lab, and former Teaching Fellow in KPU’s Teaching and Learning Commons.
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
In both academic and workplace settings, there is a shared recognition of the need to prepare a workforce for future work environments. One academic leader has concisely summarized this challenge from the higher education perspective:
“Future work will involve graduates more and more in
Working with knowledge that does not yet exist,
Using knowledge practices that do not yet exist
In work roles that do not yet exist.”
From a workplace perspective, a leader in one of our local companies has expressed the need as follows:
“In such an uncertain state, admitting that we simply don’t know what exact skills we’ll need in the future may be our most important step. In our technology company, we know that one thing we’ll need is a high degree of adaptability: the ability to navigate new territory and grow accordingly. To support this type of workforce, we need to focus as much on how emerging workers develop as on what they’re taught.”
Amidst this uncertainty about future workplaces and work practices, the one thing we can count on is a focus on innovation and change in the workplace. Preparing learners for this in both higher education and workplace contexts will require us to explicitly develop capability for workplace innovation. This capability, as with our current cross-curricular graduate attributes in higher education, can become a foundational meta-capability to enable adapting, shaping, and leading other future practices for the common good.
Workplace Innovation as a social process
Workplace Innovation goes beyond typical notions product innovation. It can involve changes in work practices, processes or roles; it can also include “a change in business structure, Human Resources management, relationships with clients and suppliers… combining human, organizational and technological dimensions… All enterprises, no matter their size, can benefit from Workplace Innovation”.
In our current initiatives, the working definition of Workplace Innovation focuses on the social process of creating lasting value by mobilizing new ideas in the workplace. We emphasize with our learners that the capability applies beyond their workplaces in their other roles as community members and global citizens. The European Union Guide to Workplace Innovation notes that this social process “simultaneously results in improved organizational performance and enhanced quality of work life”.
Engaging students with workplace innovation in the teaching and learning environment
We want to prepare students for future practices where they can engage with innovation in all of these ways. One of the best routes to do this is to create internal experiential learning for innovation capability within our academic programs: changes in our learning and teaching “workplaces” can become opportunities for students to develop their capability as knowledgeable ‘critical friends’ of innovation in work practices, outcomes or products, processes, roles and expectations.
Many of our instructors can easily cite examples where their introduction of a new learning practice has invoked a range of responses to innovation, from enthusiasm and support through skepticism and apprehension, to reluctant compliance or resistance.
The negative end of this range can become immediately apparent in a classroom context where "closed" body language from students shows their opposition to the specifics of the change – or to the overall notion of changing the rules just when they felt they had mastered the previously expected practices. Even at the positive end, adapting to a change in practice can be a disappointing experience when students approach it without sufficient thought to its implications, e.g. for the time to complete an assignment in a new way of working.
The introduction of a new learning practice can become a ‘teachable moment’ for students to develop their skills, knowledge, and mindsets for workplace innovation. We can go beyond the impacts on individual work practices to include deeper change in the work of learning:
Introducing students to a more radical change in learning practices might include a unit of study based on a short Massive Open Online Course accompanied by reflection and analysis of both the student-as-user and student-as-adaptor experiences. The reflection could include ways to adapt the MOOC format to be effective for a wider range of users, such as a MOOC-Centred Learning Community.
A different opportunity to use the work of learning as an opportunity to engage with innovation would be explicit participation as Lead Users in pilot projects with innovation teaching and learning. Another opportunity is to engage senior students in supporting other students in their adaptation and reflection on new learning practices. The latter role is a natural extension to current programs for Peer Mentors supporting new students in their transition to post-secondary learning.
Co-development of instructional resources in Students as Partners programs can be another way to engage students in workplace innovation projects, when a teacher identifies a challenge to be addressed with new and uncertain ideas.
Other innovative teaching and learning practices engage students in intrapreneurial activities within our teaching and learning environments. For example, at Tufts University’s Experimental College “students participate by designing, selecting and teaching our courses.” Every year Tufts students propose new courses on emerging topics to a joint student-faculty board, recruit instructors from their greater Boston area and also participate as Peer Instructors.
In the current structure for these activities, students often do not receive guidance on how to translate these activities into the innovation context of an external workplace, or to integrate the skills, mindsets and contextual knowledge they have developed into a coherent description of personal strengths (and areas where they recognize the need for further development).
The Implications for Higher Education: Practicing What We Preach on the Importance of Innovation
We recognize the challenges our academic institutions face in becoming more systematic in our approach to workplace innovation in our own workplaces for learning. We believe this is a challenge we must take on. A public sector innovation leader has provided us with a concise rationale:
“To train the next generation of…innovators, institutions of higher education must become labs for learning and engagement as they develop curricula that support an ecosystem of experiential learning opportunities that bridge gaps not only across disciplines, but also across social, political, and economic cleavages. By balancing theory and practice in pedagogy, educators can ensure a willing cadre of… innovators ready to tackle our most intractable problems. The future depends on how effectively we respond to the problems we face and to those we have not yet imagined”
(A deeper exploration of these issues, reporting on our 2018 pilot projects at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Workplace Innovation as a Graduate Attribute, can be found in our upcoming book chapter Carey, T., Dastur, F., & Karaush, I. (2019). Workplace Innovations and Practice Futures. In Challenging Future Practice Possibilities (pp. 229-242). Brill Sense Publishers.)