Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for WINCan and Executive-in-Residence for the British Columbia Association of Institutes and Universities and the Monash University Faculty of Arts .
Felix Nobis is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University (our WINCan partner in Melbourne Australia), Work-Integrated Learning coordinator for the Faculty of Arts and project leader for the undergraduate option in Workplace Innovation .
We’ve been creating resources for our first course unit in Monash University’s Workplace Innovation option, to go live with a pilot cohort in August. That’s led to a new working definition for Workplace Innovation:
Workplace innovation is the social process of mobilizing new ideas to create better work.
Here’s our initial drill-down on the words and phrases, to help students explore what it means for them:
Work
The word “work” usually is associated with employment, income, etc. and your future career and professional workplaces are a primary workplace context in ATS2211 Understanding Workplace Innovation: Concepts and Cases.
The other primary workplace context for ATS2211 is our Monash teaching and learning environment as a “workplace for learning”. We’ll be helping you rethink your experiences with innovation in your work as a learner, to develop and demonstrate your capability to engage with innovation in your professional careers and employment (and in your other roles as community members and global citizens).
But we also work in other contexts: in our homes and families, as community members and global citizens. Although we won’t talk as much about these secondary work contexts in ATS2211, the capabilities you develop for workplace innovation in career and employment workplaces are equally applicable in these other roles and contexts.
Context is a word that’s going to come up throughout ATS2211. Even within career workplaces, there are significant differences in what workplace innovation means and how it is carried out. We’ll look at some of those differences between workplace sectors, via mini-cases from corporations, public sector agencies, work in the social and community not-for-profit sectors, small companies, etc.
Better
“Better” can refer to the outputs and impacts of the work, what you might think of in a job as “what I’m being paid for” and what organizational management might term “our offering”[1] on the basis of which we are compensated or resourced - whether from a “paying client” for a company, from a government in the case of a public sector agency such as Police and Fire services, or from a mix as in the case of tuition fees and government grants for teaching and learning at Monash.
We often think of innovations in terms of particular products – take a look at this short video from the University of Leeds for a lively discussion of “the world’s greatest (product) innovation”. However, sometimes the innovation is in a process or service: think of the service you get from a surgical team who restore health to a diseased foot. Most often, there is both a service and a product involved, e.g., consider this video of the Jaipur Foot, which is partly a product for amputees and partly a service to help them adjust to and manage their new device.
“Better work” can also mean more effective and efficient internal ways to produce these results, or more effective and efficient external ways to engage our users with them or supply them to our clients.
The two definitions of “better” above both relate directly to the mission of the organizational workplace. In addition, “better” can mean better for the workforce who carry out the work – in what the job demands of them, in the enjoyment from the work itself or in personal impacts such as improved career prospects or deeper capabilities. We’ll be focusing throughout ATS2211 on workplace innovations that achieve a “better” in both senses: improving an organization’s performance of its mission and improving the quality of work life for those doing the work.
New
The extent to which an idea is “new” depends on context [2]: a new idea or concept for teaching and learning at Monash may be new to a particular Monash instructor or student but already proven elsewhere in the university. Or an idea may be new to Monash but already in use externally, at another research university, another institution in a different sector of Australian higher education, or from outside the country (and sometimes outside higher education entirely).
And some of what we do in teaching and learning at Monash will be “first-in-the-world” – in the case of ATS2211, the first course unit offering all graduates the opportunity to develop “innovatorship” (although, like most innovations, we are building on the good work done by others before us).
Mobilizing
As the quote in the sidebar notes, new ideas on their own don’t constitute an innovation: it’s only when we can put them to work for a productive change that we get to an innovation.
“Think of something new: you’ve got an invention. Apply an invention – yours or someone else’s – to change the world in which you live: you’ve got an innovation…
— Arno Penvias Nobel Laureate in Physics, 1978”
Social Process
Workplace Innovation is a team sport: the image we might have of ‘the lone inventor’ gets replaced by a team of people who apply their different skills, perspectives and ways of thinking to create the better work result. In the process, the team typically creates new knowledge. That knowledge can be related to the context of our particular workplace or organization; it can also have larger impacts when our team comes up with new ideas with broader applicability.
Different contexts produce different ‘who does what’ social processes. For example, the initial impetus for a workplace innovation project may come from management or it may be generated from the workforce. However, a defining characteristic of workplace innovation is direct involvement of the workforce in carrying out – and being responsible for – the process of mobilizing new ideas to create better work. (In the past, this was sometimes referred to as “employee-driven innovation”[3], but since volunteers provide much of the workforce in the social and community sectors we want them to be included in the broader term “workforce-driven innovation at work”. This also invites users into the process, in their role as partners in the work of co-creating value which is typical in-service offerings.)
For additional information:
[1] The term “offering” comes from a classic typology of Ten Types of Innovation, created by Doblin Innovation Consultancy (now part of the Deloitte group). There’s cogent description in this post on Medium, including the Jaipur Foot example and video link.
[2] Janssen, M., Stoopendaal, A. M. V., & Putters, K. (2015). Situated novelty: Introducing a process perspective on the study of innovation. Research Policy, 44(10), 1974-1984.
[3] Høyrup, S., Bonnafous-Boucher, M., Hasse, C., Møller, K., & Lotz, M. (Eds.). (2012). Employee-driven innovation: A new approach. Palgrave Macmillan.