Thomas Carey is WINCan’s Co-Principal Catalyst for Academic Partnerships, a former Professor and Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo, and Executive-in-Residence for Teaching & Learning in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University .
Felix Nobis is Senior Lecturer in Critical Theatre Performance at Monash University (our WINCan partner in Melbourne Australia), Work-Integrated Learning coordinator for the Faculty of Arts and project leader for course units in Workplace Innovation.
Mathias Stevenson is a Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literature, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University and co-author of the book Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy: Politics, Languages, and Multiple Marginalities.
Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and WINCan’s Research Director.
Great news: we found out this week that WINCan and two of our academic partners have been short-listed as finalists for the 2022 Innovation and Entrepreneurship Teaching Excellence Award (based in Europe – this is the 8th annual award). In September, our team presents at the final competition round in Cyprus – virtually, from our home bases in Canada and Australia.
Regardless of the outcome from this final round of competition, our collaboration with Monash University (Australia) and Nipissing University (Ontario) has already achieved several “firsts”:
This is the first year for the award to acknowledge the growing importance of employee-led workplace innovation – in the past, “Innovation” and “Entrepreneurship´ were often treated as synonyms.
This is the first year that a Faculty of Arts has appeared among the finalists (or even on the long list?). Congrats to our colleagues at Monash Arts in Melbourne for breaking this barrier…and the interdisciplinary team from the Faculties of Arts and Design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in B.C. for early proof-of-concept tests for some of the ideas.
This is the first time the award finalists have included a collaboration where the original ideas were successfully adapted for different institutional, disciplinary and international contexts. (Watch for our announcement next month of a new Canadian adaptation…)
We’ve included below some elements from the description we created to make our case for inclusion amongst the award finalists, “Engaging Students with an Adaptable Model for Workplace Innovation Capability”; an extended version will be included as a chapter in the annual Anthology of Case Histories from the final round of the competition in September. [The sections and Headings below were prescribed by the Award organizers, so that all submissions had a standard format for the judges to assess…]
In the Introduction section we showed where our work fits in the larger landscape of workplace innovation in higher education:
Employee-led Workplace Innovation engages employees from all parts of an organization in “a participatory process of innovation, leading to empowering workplace practices and continuing learning and reflection” [Totterdill et al 2022]. A growing body of research – primarily in Europe – is demonstrating that engaging employees across an organization in workplace innovation can improve both organizational performance and employee quality of work life [Oeij et al 2021].
Our initiative to develop workplace innovation capability in postsecondary education is part of a growing recognition that “innovation and entrepreneurship are not only distinct concepts, but they also play out in postsecondary institutional contexts in different ways” [Swayne et al 2019]. All students should have opportunities to engage with innovation and entrepreneurship [Hamouda 2018; Hero & Lindfors 2019], as a core graduate attribute for future workplaces.
A distinctive feature of our approach is ongoing dialogue across academic and workplace sectors. For example, our curriculum structure has been informed by workplace needs and research with leading-edge workplaces. This has produced an adaptable instructional design with the aim of context-sensitive versions being customized for different academic and workplace settings.
The Contexts section of the Case History goes on to describe the contexts for our current course units in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University and the School of Business at Nipissing University. Those descriptions were adapted from numerous posts on this website about our Canadian and Australian projects. We also summarized the distinctive role of the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada as a bridge between higher education institutions and leading-edge workplaces:
Our linkage to workplace contexts is provided by the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada (WINCan.ca), a not-for-profit organization supporting collaborations between academic and workplace partners to advance employee-led Workplace Innovation. WINCan also provides links to Workplace Innovation Europe and the EU Workplace Innovation Network.
In the Challenges section, we articulated our goals for an Adaptable Instructional Design, Resources and Activities – and some of what we have learned en route to that goal.
Past studies have demonstrated that interdisciplinary “entrepreneurship for all” teaching can produce positive outcomes for a broad range of students, provided the learning resources and activities are “tailored to the specific needs of different fields of study” across technical and business domains [Hamouda 2018 – note that this project was a past co-winner of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Teaching Excellence Award]. We also wanted to create learning resources and activities which could also be adapted for students from Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS), who are often uncertain about where and how they can contribute value in the workplace.
In addition to adaptability across academic programs, we also wanted to create learning resources and activities which our workplace partners could adapt for their use, in specific organizational contexts and professional/technical work domains.
We then discussed the three Strategies we developed to address these challenges:
A Progression of Learning Activities for Innovation Capability
This approach allows learners with varying comfort levels regarding innovation to gradually engage in more complex and uncertain activities. Each course unit has hands-on project work for initial experiences in the sequence, demonstrating how graduates and work-placement students can add value in workplaces; more complex experiences may be limited to engaging with Illustrative and Practice case stories…
Common Student Experiences as Workplace Innovation Tasks
… we have used our own “workplaces for learning” as a source of illustrative innovations and as a context for innovation project tasks. The authenticity of these learning experience lies in students’ recognition of the need for solutions to challenges they themselves have encountered in and around campus. (The case stories in the learning resources also demonstrate innovation in a wide range of external contexts.)…
Adapting Resources and Activities Across Fields of Study and Work
As we hoped, the use of a case-based instructional design in the learning resources and the use of the students’ own ‘workplace for learning’ in the project tasks supported adapting the resources from a Faculty of Arts to a School of Business. Extensive use of illustration and practice cases made it easier to substitute relevant examples for a new context…
In the Canadian Business School context, working learners – half the class – focused the application projects in their out-of-class workplaces, validating our goal of work-ready capability. Monash Arts students working part-time off-campus reported similar experiences…For the School of Business course unit, the large number of Accounting students in the School provided opportunities to illustrate contextualizing cases to a professional domain of work and study.
You can read more here about the most recent results from our learning resources and designs, including assessment of Innovation Mindsets using the Motivation to Innovate Inventory.
The final element in making our case for our inclusion as an award finalist was our Future Plans:
Our plans for further development include (i) ongoing revisions to the learning design and resources, (ii) adaptations for other academic contexts and (iii) ongoing collaborations with workplace partners to adapt the activity progression and the resources for their contexts.
i) Revisions to the learning design and resources will allow us to address observed shortcomings in the initial offerings. In addition to revisions listed above, in both units we observed lack of consideration for the needs of the university workforce implementing the innovative ideas and resulting changes in workload and quality of work. In future, we will more strongly emphasize involving all stakeholders in co-design of solutions.
ii) Further adaptations of the learning design and resources for diverse contexts are currently in progress: e.g., we are collaborating with the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Science on an adaptation as co-curricular resources for student self-directed learning in workplace innovation (leading to applied projects recognized by micro-credentials) as part of their Arts and Science Internship Program. Our 2022-23 plan also includes collaboration on adaptations for Polytechnic and Technical College contexts in Canada.
iii) Collaboration with workplace partners has been a key element in developing our learning design and resources. In 2022-23, our WINCan partners will be working with three regional innovation centres and one pan-Canadian sector-specific workplace network to field test use case scenarios and/or context-specific adaptations of our learning designs and resources for their organizations. We also plan, in future, to collaborate further with workplace partners on opportunities for students in work-integrated learning. We believe job-capable graduates need exposure to at least two contexts for innovation; however, to date we only have preliminary ‘thought experiments’ in this area.
Acknowledgements: Our course offering in the School of Business at Nipissing University was supported in part by funding from the eCampus Ontario VLS 1 Program. Our collaboration with the Faculty of Arts at the University of Toronto is supported in part by funding from the eCampus Ontario VLS2 program. Our current work in Canada to foster collaborations for workplace innovation[TC1] capability across workplace and higher ed sectors is supported in part by funding from the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Centre.
References
Hamouda, A. (2018). Entrepreneurship for all: an exploration of the impact of entrepreneurship education across disciplines. In International Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Academic Conferences International Limited.
Hero, L. M., & Lindfors, E. (2019). Students’ learning experience in a multidisciplinary innovation project. Education+ Training, 61(4), 500-522.
Oeij, P., Preenen, P., & Dhondt, S. (2021). Workplace innovation as a process: Examples from Europe. In The Palgrave Handbook of Workplace Innovation (pp. 199-221).
Swayne, N., Selznick, B., McCarthy, S., & Fisher, K. A. (2019). Uncoupling innovation and entrepreneurship to improve undergraduate education. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development.
Totterdill, P., Pot, F., Dhondt, S. and Warhurst, C. (2022). Workplace Innovation – Europe's Competitive Edge: A manifesto for enhanced performance and working lives. European Journal of Workplace Innovation. 7(1) p. 132