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.
In a previous post we described the team and goals for our 2018-19 Innovation Skills Catalyst project In Ontario. In this post we summarize some of the insights coming out of this project and include link below to other posts on specific resources and themes from our work.
Sharing Exemplary Resources and Practices for Workplace Innovation
Two Capability Specifications were shared by Workplace Partners for adaptation and re-use: one on Innovation Mindsets and Abilities by the Dhaval Shaw (Director of Innovation at The Bank of Canada – Banque du Canada) and one on IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Digital Badges by Karel Vredenburg (Director, Global Academic Programs for IBM’s Design Program Office and Head of IBM Canada’s Design Studio).
The Bank of Canada specification was applied by workplace partner Central Mortgage and Housing and generated ongoing interactions between the two agencies concerning validity and adaptability. Karel also arranged for academic use of IBM’s online learning resources for the Practitioner Level of the Digital Badge accreditation. Feedback from our pilot tests of these resources in two academic contexts were shared with IBM Canada – primarily on adaptability in the academic setting.
Collaboration on Planning and Adaptation of New Learning Resources
At one of Partnership Meeting hosted at York’s Lassonde School of Engineering, we built a matrix of potential new Learning Resources on workplace innovation for shared use and adaptation. We used the complementary dimensions of Resource Type (Knowledge Map, Knowledge Synthesis, Outcomes Specification, Learning Design, Adaptable Resource, Assessment Resource) and Innovation Activity Type.
From this Matrix, the project team selected pilot resources using two criteria: Expressions of Interest by at least two partners and Testing as many different Resource and Activity types as possible. You can see results from these resource development projects in our blog posts on Making the Return on Investment Case for a Workplace Innovation project and Innovation Adaptation: A Systematic Approach to (How) Will It Work Here?. We’ve also summarized the approach that emerged to support adaptability of these resources to different contexts, both academic and workplace, in a post on Adapting Learning Resources across Higher Ed and Workplace Contexts.
We noted some other ways that differences between the academic and workplace contexts needed to be factored into resources intended for use across these sectors. For example, a pilot resource on Resources for Resilience in Workplace Innovation Projects took an innovative view of individual Resilience framed around an individual’s Resource Base for rebounding from setbacks and surprises. This resource was tested with graduate students at York University and with a group of workplace innovation managers at a professional conference in Ontario. The key insight from the latter group was that they needed more illustrative cases and practice exercises to meet their needs (whereas the graduate students were comfortable with a more conceptual approach). Some of these ideas were incorporated into Resilience resources used in a York course in Winter semester 2019.
Other Collaborative Activities
A variety of other collaborative opportunities emerged during the course of the Innovation Skills Catalyst project. All of the workplace partners and all but one of the academic partners reached out to others within their organizations to engage them in the ongoing partnership. For example, one corporate and one public sector partner arranged meetings with their Human Resource leaders to help the project team to explore deeper engagement in the next stage of work.
A Design Challenge team of academic and workplace partners hamming it up at one of our Partnership meetings
Making presentations with the WINCan leadership team to potential funders and partners also became a shared responsibility. For example, the WINCan Ontario team presented on our work to staff of the Skills and Employability Branch of Employment and Social Development Canada in October 2018 (at the invitation of Rachel Wernick, Senior Assistant Deputy Minister). Two Workplace Partners were part of the presentation team along with two Academic Partners (as well as one student research assistant).
In addition, innovation leaders from two public sector partners are actively involved in planning and coaching for the Spring 2019 pilot online course in Knowledge Management & Workplace Innovation offered by WINCan’s Lead Workplace Partner, the Knowledge Management Institute of Canada, including providing Design Challenges for learner teams to address.
Finding Common Purpose, Engaging Across the Innovation Function
The academic and workplace partners shared the high-level WINCan goals: Every Employee Contributing to Innovation for workplace contexts and the complementary Every Graduate an Innovation-Enabler in academic contexts. (York University was a unique case, as both an academic and workplace partner.) They also shared a common interest in developing their professional expertise and networks in workplace innovation.
These twin motivations left a considerable gap in terms of specific value propositions for their organizations. Of course, one of the goals of the project was to explore where this new kind of academic-workplace collaboration could fill such gaps. In addition to the collaborative elements described above, we could have been more focused on short-term organizational payoffs.
For example, in the 2020 WINCan work plan there is a strong focus on co-defining work-integrated learning tasks which students could take on to support workplace innovation project teams. This is intended to allow our workplace partners to have a more influential role in shaping our curriculum plans to ensure the students can deliver value in their work-integrated learning assignments, in addition to receiving valuable exposure to the contexts and goals of employee-driven workplace innovation
Finally, we now recognize that our invitations to workplace partners were to individuals responsible for leading and executing innovation activities. They are not necessarily responsible for building innovation capacity in their organizations. It became clear that strategic human resources (HR) professionals are an important sub-group of workplace partners who could contribute valuable insight to the initiative. We also did not initially consider the important role that facilitator/connector organizations could have in the initiative. This is an important group to involve, as they can cast a wide net to recruit future partners and have their own distinctive perspective on the value of academic-workplace collaboration around our shared challenge of developing a more innovation workforce for Canada.
Special thanks to Sharon Brodovsky and Liz Martin of Cathexis Consulting, who contributed to many of the insights above in their role as our Development Evaluation advisors (and in many other ways that were not in their official role, with an admirable ‘whatever we can do’ spirit!)