Janet Zlotnik is a Project Lead in Academic Support Planning at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
Thomas Carey is WINCan’s co-Principal Catalyst for Academic Partnerships and a former Professor and Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo.
The value of Workplace Innovation in preparing graduates for the Future of Work has been explored from different angles in our WINCan work and in this blog. Here we consider the implications of developing “every graduate” innovation capability on prevailing ‘ways of knowing’ in higher education. Our focus will be on polytechnic education and institutions, and how in that context including workplace innovation capability as a graduate outcome prompts us to:
expand our conception of knowledge as driven solely by technology, and to
discover new ways of working beyond traditional vocational and professional domains.
We assert that if Workplace Innovation initiatives are to be successful in educational contexts, systematic investigation of these and other epistemological issues is key. [You can learn more about the distinctive role of polytechnic institutions re Workplace Innovation in our article in a Special Issue of the Journal of Innovation in Polytechnic Education 4(1) ].
Moving Beyond Technology-Driven Innovation
Employee-Led Workplace Innovation will mark a distinctive change to undergraduate curricula and thus a concomitant shift in the epistemology of polytechnic education. One of the distinctive features of Polytechnic Education has been a broad epistemological perspective, incorporating craft, professional and conceptual bodies of knowledge. This has ensured that graduates have the skills and knowledge required by employers and in addition they have the mindsets and experiences required to create value on the job with those resources – to be Job-Ready, not just Job-Knowledgeable.
When changes in a work domain dramatically expand the scope of the knowledge to be applied and the purposes that knowledge is to serve, we are often faced with an integration of new frameworks for knowledge, and not just additional knowledge within a familiar epistemology. To leverage and sustain momentum in employee workplace innovation post-pandemic while building on our distinctive polytechnic epistemology, we have identified two epistemological issues on which to focus.
The first epistemological issue is the necessity – and opportunity – to expand our conception of innovation as driven by advances in science and technology to incorporate human-centred, Employee-Led workplace innovation. It involves distinguishing between the framing of innovation as Science and Technology Driven versus an Employee-Led and Design-Driven social process of the type that arose in the Nordic countries and has been explicitly applied to workplace innovation in Industry 4.0. Different regions have tended to excel in one or the other of these modes, but as the policy emphasis has shifted to successfully incorporating both approaches within regional economies and organizations, the impact on educational preparation for the future of work requires attention.
Beyond developing the Skills and Knowledge for workplace innovation, learners also need a shift in mindset to develop identity, self-efficacy and agency as innovators (in the workplace and in their other roles as community members and global citizens). For students outside of Technology and Applied Science domains, this will involve reconceiving innovation and their role in it; for students in Technology and Applied Science domains, it will involve integrating both types of innovation into their professional and vocational identity. (You can see illustrations for these implications in a Professional domain in our posts on Employee-Led Workplace Innovation in Accountancy; there will be illustrations of the former context in an upcoming post on the transformative learning experiences reported by an interdisciplinary student cohort as they developed their innovator identity, self-efficacy and motivation.)
New “Ways of Knowing” for Workplace Innovation
The second epistemological issue concerns finding new ways of working with knowledge beyond our traditional professional and vocational domains. Examples from the past that illustrate earlier epistemological shifts in polytechnic education can provide insights into current issues. Tom describes below his personal experience as a practitioner/teacher during an epistemic expansion in the Software Engineering work domain (from the early 1980s to the early 1990s):
With the advent of interactive systems and personal computers, the body of knowledge around Human-Computer Interaction (as it was then labelled) grew in importance and scope. However, including this knowledge in Software Engineering curricula met with epistemological resistance: much of the knowledge came from Ways of Knowing in the social sciences and was deemed lacking in technical rigour (“airy-fairy” or “touchy-feely” being typical descriptors).
That view of what knowledge counted as an important requirement for software engineering students was eventually overcome, by employer demand for graduate expertise – and student demand for preparation –combined with efforts by professional societies to include new types of knowledge and Knowing into curriculum standards[1] and to provide resources for course design and learning activities. This expansion of the epistemological framework for the knowledge base, which now seems natural to academics and practitioners alike, took about twelve years.
In the meantime, both instructors and students grappled with the differences across the Ways of Knowing in this new interdisciplinary work domain. Software Engineering students had to learn how to create and apply knowledge from user-centred studies; students from the social sciences working with them had to learn to speak in Computational Thinking terms in order to influence technical solutions; both groups had to learn “Designerly Ways of Knowing” – which later evolved into Design Thinking – in order to move beyond their disciplinary mindsets.
What might a similar epistemological shift look like in our current context, to address the interdisciplinary aspects of workplace innovation in a polytechnic? If a business school were to include ideas from employee-led workplace innovation in its curriculum, one example would be to incorporate the process of Hypothesis-Driven Design. The Harvard Business School case study on this topic distinguishes the following approaches to prototype design and testing:
a classic Waterfall Approach with stages of Requirements, Design, Development, and Testing. This linear process is not well-suited for ill-defined challenges with uncertain dimensions: these challenges do not satisfy the underlying assumption that each of these stages can be successfully completed before the later stages of activity have begun.
an Incremental Build and Test approach in which small-scale solutions are tested, refined and released over time to incrementally build toward a total solution. This approach works if we can identify in advance which aspects of the solution can be developed and released without having to be reversed when we learn more later.
Hypothesis-Driven Design – adapted from Lean Startup methods – with careful risk management based on articulating design assumptions and evaluating the impacts if they are proven wrong. This approach helps us to focus iterations of Design, Development and Testing on high-priority design hypotheses with the greatest impact on project success if they are proven wrong late in the process.
This process of thinking more strategically about what needs to be prioritized in the testing process is a conceptual leap for many students – as it can be for professionals and project managers – who may be used to success via a “Tinkering” approach or following a formula. This can be exacerbated by a naïve view of innovation as the ‘creative bolt of lightning’ experienced by a lone innovator, rather than viewing innovation as a social process of collaboration by interdisciplinary or cross-functional teams.
In considering these examples, it is clear that simply adding new competencies to curricula (and swapping out others which have become dated) will not suffice if Workplace Innovation curriculum and pedagogy is to uphold graduates as they navigate the Future of Work. Attention to these – and other - epistemological issues – should be explored, with findings driving curricular and pedagogical choices within polytechnic education and institutions.
In addition to strengthening the impact of Workplace Innovation as a graduate attribute, this approach and its attendant experimentation hold promise as a model for other complex capabilities that challenge current ways of knowing, including interculturalism, Indigenization, sustainability, and digital transformation.
Acknowledgment: We appreciate the contribution of Dr Tom Roemer of the British Columbia Institute of Technology, for conversations that spurred this exploration.