Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and Research Director for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada.
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
One of our primary WINCan goals is to help Workplace Partners ensure “Every Employee can Contribute to Innovation”. All the innovation leaders we’ve worked with – from leading-edge companies, public sector agencies and higher education – emphasized the challenge of his organization-wide and organization-deep engagement. Here’s a sample of the stories they’ve shared with us:
How can we build an organizational culture – and supporting infrastructure – to engage every employee with workplace innovation? That challenge came from innovation leaders in a public sector organization with dual missions: both (i) creating public policy to address a national goal around meeting basic needs in affordable ways and also (ii) providing a public support service as a key element in achieving that goal. The employees in the service unit, focused on operational efficiency, made up three quarters of the agency’s workforce. They tended to regard the organization’s innovation aspirations as being directed more to the public policy unit, which was introducing methods such as Open Innovation, Design Thinking and Crowdsourcing that the operational employees found out of sync with their work context and roles.
We describe in this post a way to bridge the perceived gap between the innovation capabilities and experiences across the workplace: a Ladder of Opportunities to progressively build skills, knowledge and mindsets for innovation, allowing employees to choose their own level of engagement a any given time. We also outline results from initial Proof-of-Concept tests and work underway with workplace partners.
(We should also note that Employee Capability for innovation is only one part of the Organizational Capability required for successful workplace innovation to create lasting value. The leading framework for this organization capability, the Fifth Element Model created and deployed by Workplace Innovation Europe as illustrated in Figure 1 below, outlines three additional discrete Capability elements:
Job and Team structures which nurture and encourage workplace innovation
Management policies to support and recognize employee workplace innovation
Employee engagement in collaborative leadership and ownership of workplace innovation and an integrative ‘Fifth Element’ to bring all the elements together into a cohesive innovation culture).
Figure 1: Enhanced innovation, performance and working life.
Professional Development in Workplace Innovation
In order for employees to be capable of making meaningful contributions to innovation development, they [and their organizations] have to invest in their professional development.[i]
Professional Development for Workplace Innovation has become a focal point for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, framed as a joint project involving (i) workplace partners developing capability in their own workforces and (ii) higher education institutions developing workplace innovation capability as a graduate outcome – to prepare all students to engage with innovation in the workplace. An ideal professional development framework would have the following characteristics:
1. Include both individual and team capability, emphasizing innovation as a collaborative activity and workplace innovation as a social process. Figure 2 illustrates how the appropriate team size and diversity could increase along with the complexity and uncertainty of the needs and issues.
2. Encompass a broad range of employee innovation work projects, including individual behaviour such as Job Crafting (which is already being promoted in many organizations as an “every employee” activity[i] ), small teams adapting new practices in a single workplace[ii] unit (Innovation Adaptation) larger and more diverse teams addressing innovation challenges across workplace units (Design Innovation[iii]), and Intrapreneurship[iv] activities to pursue new enterprise models. Note that each such project is framed as the competency to accomplish a particular work project. Figure 3 shows the types of work projects included in our current Professional Development prototype.
This is of course a subset of innovation tasks and roles. E.g., we have not included Team Job Crafting[v] as a task or the ‘scout’ role of identifying potential Innovation Adaptation candidates.
3. For each type of project, support learners in developing an appropriate mix of Knowledge, Skills, and Experiences. Over time, engagement in innovation projects should also help employees develop the required Mindsets for workplace innovation (which can be nurtured but are not subject to direct instruction). For example, where past descriptions of innovation Mindsets focused on generics such as “Persistence to get the job done”, we now recognize innovation-specific attributes such as employees’ sense of Identity, Self-Efficacy and Motivation as Innovators.
4. Structure the professional development activities as a progressive ramp-up of capability for workplace innovation. Creating a continuum of workplace innovation with a gentle on-ramp is intended to allow employees in the workplace – and students in higher education – to feel they are engaged in the organization’s innovation mission while also choosing their own comfort level in terms of the levels of complexity, scope and risk in their innovation activities.
Going back to the scenario from the public sector agency with which we began this post, we believe this can reduce the organizational divide over what workplace innovation is and who can fully participate. Our organizations need to support diverse participation in Employee-Driven Innovation for employees[i], while building understanding applicable to more complex and uncertain projects. Figure 4 illustrates this visually as a progressive Ladder of Opportunities in innovation projects: e.g., the capability for Innovation Adaptation becomes a base for the additional capability needed in Design Innovation (i.e., creating a new design solution should be proceeded by design research on current solutions which might address the design challenge).
Professional development for progressively more complex innovation activities should also convey that these different types of Innovation Activities are equally valued within the organization. For example, achieving an Intrapreneurial goal may have the largest scope of impact; however, these activities are usually the least likely to reach their intended conclusion, involve the smallest cohort of employees and take the longest time to complete. In addition, a less complex activity – such as team Job Crafting or Innovation Adaptation – can often be scaled up within the organization beyond the original innovators.
Prototyping a Professional Development Ladder of Opportunities for Workplace Innovation
The “Ladder of Opportunities” outlined here is our current prototype designed to achieve the four characteristics above as one potential contribution to address the needs of our opening scenario (and other needs expressed by our partners in professional development for employee engagement in workplace innovation) . We briefly describe here our ongoing efforts to develop and test this prototype; the results will be described in future posts in this project’s weblog.
Our current implementation of this Professional Development Ladder builds cumulative capability in Job Crafting, Innovation Adaptation and Design Innovation for students at our Australian partner university. The unifying framework to make the capabilities “stackable” is the Four Key Questions approach to Design Innovation using Design Thinking[i], from which we have reverse-engineered subset competencies applicable in Job Crafting and Innovation Adaptation and integrated them with specific Skills and Experiences for Job Crafting and Innovation Adaptation. In Canada, a second higher ed partner is also testing this framework to develop workplace innovation capability as a graduate outcome.
Two types of prototype testing are in progress or planned for workplace contexts:
A series of Proof-of-Concept tests are underway to create case story resources in specific work domains, beginning with Accountancy in August 2021. Subsequent work domains are planned in the domains of Human Resource Management and Software Development. The resulting case stories will be linked to domain-specific versions of online learning resources being created for eCampus Ontario’s Virtual Learning System. (A revised set of case stories on workplace innovation in higher education teaching and learning is also being prepared for use by academic partners.)
Prototype use of the Professional Development Ladder is part of the value proposition on offer in our Fall 2021 regional Innovation Roundtables with potential new workplace partners, beginning with alumni of the Innovation Catalyst program from the WEtech Alliance (a regional innovation centre for Windsor/-Essex in Ontario, Canada). Other components on our initial menu for the Roundtables are adaptations to our Canadian context of The Fifth Element framework described above and Applied Research Syntheses on other challenges and issues in workplace innovation as identified by new workplace partners.
References:
[1] Messmann, G., & Mulder, R. H. (2017). Proactive employees: The relationship between work-related reflection and innovative work behaviour. In Goller, M., & Paloniemi, S. (Eds). Agency at Work, Springer, Cham. p. 142. See also Evans, K. and Waite, E. (2010) 'Stimulating the innovation potential of 'routine' workers through workplace learning', Transfer, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp.243–25.
[2] Oeij, P. R., & Dhondt, S. (2017). Theoretical approaches supporting workplace innovation. In Oeij, P., Rus, D., & Pot, F. D. (Eds.). Workplace Innovation. Springer, Cham. See also Bindl, U. K., Unsworth, K. L., Gibson, C. B., & Stride, C. B. (2019). Job crafting revisited: Implications of an extended framework for active changes at work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104(5), 605.
[3] Lempiälä, T., Yli-Kauhaluoma, S., & Näsänen, J. (2018). Similar structures, different interpretations: perceived possibilities for employee-driven innovation in two teams within an industrial organization. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, 22(4-5), 362-380.
[4] Høyrup, S. (2012). Employee-driven innovation: A new phenomenon, concept and mode of innovation. In Employee-driven innovation (pp. 3-33). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
[5] Pot, F. D., Rus, D., & Oeij, P. R. (2017). Introduction: The need to uncover the field of workplace innovation. In Oeij, P., Rus, D., & Pot, F. D. (Eds.). Workplace Innovation. Springer, Cham. See also George, A. C., Bley, S., & Pellegrino, J. (2019). Characterizing and Diagnosing Complex Professional Competencies—An Example of Intrapreneurship. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 38(2), 89-100.
[6] Tims, M., Bakker, A. B., Derks, D., & Van Rhenen, W. (2013). Job crafting at the team and individual level: Implications for work engagement and performance. Group & Organization Management, 38(4), 427-454.
[7] Kurz, V., Hüsig, S., & Dowling, M. (2018). What drives different employee types of innovative behaviour? Development and test of an integrative model of employee driven innovation in German firms. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, 22(4-5), 397-426.
[8] Liedtka, J., & Ogilvie, T. (2011). Designing for growth: A design thinking tool kit for managers. Columbia University Press.
Image credits:
Figure 1:
Used by permission © Workplace Innovation Europe
Figures 2 and 3:
Foreign Partner by Gan Khoon Lay from the Noun Project; https://thenounproject.com/term/foreign-partner/982769/
Restaurant Order by Gan Khoon Lay, licensed from AdobeStock_244886022
Superhero Businessman by Gan Khoon Lay from the Noun Project; https://thenounproject.com/term/superhero-businessman/886336/
Puzzle Piece by Gan Khoon Lay, licensed from AdobeStock_62995730
Office Workers by Gan Khoon Lay, licensed from AdobeStock_63223606
Man Dropping Phone by Gan Khoon Lay, licensed from AdobeStock_179276056
Factory Workers by Gan Khoon Lay, licensed from AdobeStock_63185007
Business Meeting (Discussion and Brainstorm) by Gan Khoon Lay, licensed from AdobeStock_38160130
Figure 4
• Happy Office by Gan Khoon Lay, licensed from AdobeStock_63286174
• Graduate by Gan Khoon Lay, licensed from AdobeStock_63226641
• People Climbing Stairs by Gan Khoon Lay, licensed from AdobeStock_156130511