Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, Executive-in-Residence with the Monash University Faculty of Arts and a former Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo
Blake Melnick, CEO and Chief Knowledge Officer for the Knowledge Management Institute of Canada
As we head into 2021, we thought it would be a good time to celebrate our WINCan accomplishments in 2020 and look forward to some of our new ventures. One of the new initiatives we had on our exploration list for 2020 a year ago has blossomed, some of our ongoing projects reached important milestones, and we also have new ventures now emerging.
Milestones Reached
In our continuing work on WINCan’s Wildly Important Goal with Higher Education partners – Every Graduate Can Be an Innovation-Enabler – we built on our past proof-of-concept ‘pretotypes’ in B.C. and our collaborative prototyping with academic and workplace partners in Ontario with our first Minimum-Viable-Product pilot course unit on Understanding Workplace Innovation completed at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The project also put into practice the results of our past research project with Australia’s National Forum on the Future of the B.A.
Providing opportunities for all undergraduate students to develop workplace innovation capability is a strategic initiative at the Monash Arts Faculty. Several past posts describe facets of the project:
How we used a workplace specification for job-ready innovation capability as a baseline an enhanced specification of career- and life-ready innovation capability
How our development of experiential learning activities with innovation in our own ‘workplace for learning’ led us to revise our working definition of Workplace Innovation
How we were able to create a series of innovation experiences of increasing complexity and scope of impact, to form a gentle on-ramp for learners in workplace innovation
Our initial plans for a follow-up course unit centred on a Workplace-Integrated-Learning placement for workplace innovation
We’ll be adding posts on other aspects of the learning design shortly, including the evidence for Transformative Learning – “learning which implies a change in identity” – as students reflected on how the course unit changed their perceptions of themselves as innovators. The team is also working on a scholarly publication on this aspect of the work, to be submitted to the Journal of Transformative Learning.
2. We also completed the first stage of our project on Sustaining Strategic Innovation in Higher Education by Adapting Insights from the Corporate Sector. We introduced this potential project in January 2020 and launched it formally in April 2020 with our partner Gina O’Connor of Babson College in the U.S.
Several past posts have described the initial work in this project:
An overview of the insights resulting from the corporate sector research which we saw as most promising for adaptation to the higher education teaching and learning context
A description of our process of building and testing scenario prototypes based on two real-world cases of institutional goals for strategic innovation
A summary of “What We Learned” from creation and analysis of these proof-of-concept pretotypes
The results from this first stage of the work have been documented more thoroughly in a chapter “Beyond the Champion – Governance and Management of Strategic Innovation in Higher Education Teaching and Learning”, submitted to a forthcoming book on Governance and Management in Higher Education in the Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning series (from Emerald Publishing).
Our Next Step plans include Walkthroughs with senior administrators from the small to mid-sized institutions in the original cases as well as developing a wider perspective by engaging with more complex institutions. For the latter, we currently have expressions of interest from three large research institutions (in Canada, the U.S. and Australia) to explore how we can develop testable scenarios for manageable aspects from their strategic innovation plans and activities.
New Ventures
3. In another post early in 2020, we sketched out a project to collaborate with small and medium-size workplaces on capability development for Workplace Innovation. In our next post we’ll be describing the first project within that stream of work. We’ve created a partnership with the WEtech Ontario Regional Innovation Centre in Windsor/Essex to help them advance their Innovation Catalyst program, which develops innovation capability in partnership with local employers.
The key team members from WEtech are Adam Frye, Director of Business Innovation and Victoria Abboud, Tech Talent Strategist. We plan to apply results from our own work and as well as adapting research evidence and exemplary practices from the global leaders in Europe. Since one of the 2021 Innovation Catalysts cohorts focused on Human Resource professionals, we expect this all create an opportunity for us to apply some of what we have been learning about the intersection of Human Resources Management and Workplace Innovation.
4. We’ve just started a partnership with two Canadian colleges who are launching programs to develop innovation capability: the Innovation micro-credential at Lethbridge College in Alberta and the Creativity and Innovation program at Vanier College in Montreal. Our first joint ventures are an Overview of our respective initiatives to create opportunities for Every Graduate to be an Innovation Enabler (March) , and a proposed collaborative session in the Driving Innovation theme area at the annual conference of Colleges and Institutes Canada (April) to reach out to other potential academic partners.
5. Finally, Blake and Tom will be contributing a chapter on “Knowledge Management and Workplace Innovation” to a book on Organizational Culture Strategies for Effective Knowledge Management and Performance. We hope to use this opportunity to create resources to engage more KM professionals in integrating workplace innovation needs and resources with their expertise and activities in Knowledge Management.