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 .
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.
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.
In our post in this weblog last month, we highlighted our inclusion amongst the finalists for the 2022 Innovation and Entrepreneurship Teaching Excellence award in Europe. One element of this final stage was the preparation of a book chapter to be included in the finalists’ Anthology of Case Studies to be published as part of the award process.
As we wrote up this report on the past, present and future of our work on engaging students with Workplace Innovation capability, we realized that some of the latest results from our initiative in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University (in Melbourne Australia) had not yet been added to the WINCan What We’re Learning weblog description of our Monash project. (We do have, however, a number of blog posts about the complementary initiative at the Nipissing University School of Business in North Bay, Ontario).
We’ve included below some of the new results from our Monash Arts project, as excerpts from the published chapter for the award Anthology to appear shortly [Nobis et al 2022]. As noted in the previous post, the section headings for the chapters in the Anthology were set by the award organizers to provide consistency across the case histories.
1. Our Case Study Contexts…
i) Faculty of Arts, Monash University (Melbourne, Australia): Monash Arts is incorporating strategic professional development elements across all programs, including key capabilities for global engagement, intercultural communication and workplace innovation. The workplace innovation team has academic staff from performing arts and global studies, a coordinator of work-integrated learning and an expert from the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada.
The team was tasked with creating a program that would introduce concepts, strategies and practices of workplace innovation through hybrid learning activities that were authentic, sustainable, scalable, and transferable.
The first interdisciplinary course unit, ATS2211 Understanding Workplace Innovation, was pilot tested with a group of 40 students in 2020. The success of that offering led to a scaled-up unit for 200 students in 2021 and a current 2022 enrolment of 320 . A second unit for Work-Integrated Learning placements is being developed...
2. Developing “Every Graduate” capability in Workplace Innovation
i) Adapting Workplace Innovation Experiences as a Progression of Learning Activities…
[You can see the history and rationale for this progression and descriptions of the activities in this previous post in our What We’re Learning weblog.]
ii) Learning Resources for the progressive sequence of Workplace Innovation activities
…To illustrate the progressive sequence of Innovation Skills (and to scaffold later Design Thinking), common workplace approaches for Innovation Adaptation were translated into the Four Key Questions format for Design Thinking [Liedtka et al 2018].
There were also illustrative cases of the technical and social processes for workplace teams to adapt an innovation into their own contexts.
iii) Applied Innovation Tasks in Context
[As an example of how students experienced the selected Workplace Innovation activities in the Monash Arts teaching and learning context…]
…Students developed individual Job Crafting e-Portfolios as a three-part deliverable:
Introduce Yourself as a Job Crafter: reflect on personal strengths, interests & goals
Workplace Alignment: propose strategies to improve learning and ‘quality of work life’ in a course unit (default) or another context
Learning Strategies and Assessment: devise the assessment for their unique crafting proposal.
3. How the Course Units Were Received by Learners
In addition to the instructors’ ongoing assessment of student engagement and learning, each course unit included several opportunities for student open-ended reflection on their learning and professional development. The comments below are illustrative of student reports on their high levels of engagement (in comparison to their other course units) and other reflections.
Monash Arts students placed more emphasis that we had expected on their development of personal identity and self-efficacy as innovators. Other salient themes related to increased confidence in applying innovation and design skills in future work – e.g., empathizing with stakeholders and collaboration within diverse teams – as well as implementing job crafting practices within their current programs of study…
As our most complex activity, the Intrapreneurship content would logically appear at the conclusion of the course unit (as in the adaptation for the Nipissing School of Business). However, we found that engaging with these examples in the first week generated notable early interest from Monash Arts students.
Students were able to adapt assigned tasks in the course unit to meet their personal needs and goals. This proved to be an important factor in sustaining a high level of engagement in the online environment, particularly with the large cohorts in Monash Arts…
4. Learning Outcomes
For each of the three applied projects, innovation Skills and Knowledge outcomes were evaluated in two ways:
Instructors used rubrics to evaluate the capability demonstrated for innovation processes.
Sponsoring clients assessed the products of Innovation Adaptation and Design Innovation.
i) Job Crafting: Monash Arts students’ e-Portfolios on Job Crafting were assessed for capacity to apply principles of job crafting to improve their work (as learners). We were encouraged by their meaningful engagement with this task and development of clear strategies to improve their work as learners. However, in future offerings, a clearer and more robust rubric along with exemplary past e-Portfolios, will support more consistent outcomes across the class.
ii) Design Adaptation: Monash Arts teams reported on their exploration into adaptation of a relevant external innovation for an internal university client. Teams showed understanding of the potential advantages of the innovation in this new context; however, their capacity to tease out salient differences between contexts was more limited. In future, we want to provide a worked example which more fully explores this aspect.
iii) Design Innovation: Team pitches and prototypes for Design Innovation were submitted as videos and evaluated for effective use of Design Thinking methods and for empathic understanding demonstrated. Although the teams showed a sound grasp of these aspects, there were process gaps in the collection of user data and in the teams’ communication of key prototype features.
…As with any newly emergent area of expertise, there is only limited research on assessing capability for employee-led workplace innovation, either within or outside of higher education. A relevant comparison point might be the assessment status in Entrepreneurship Education or Design Thinking a decade or more ago. However, there is promising recent workplace research on assessing capability for Job Crafting [Bruning & Campion 2022] and on Design Innovation – both at the end of training [Jaskyte & Liedtka 2022] and when translated into practice [Royalty et al 2021; Edelman et al 2021]. We will be investigating such measures further to guide our development of more comprehensive and reliable assessments.
5. Plans to Further Develop the Initiative
… For Monash Arts, at our 2024 target of 400 students per offering and 2 offerings per year, over 30% of Arts students will take this unit during their 3-year program (and we expect many to continue with the follow-on ATS3173 Workplace Innovation Project course unit scheduled for pilot testing in November 2022).
We have come a long way in the last three years: the word innovation did not appear any of our Arts program Learning Objectives when we started in 2019. Our challenge now is to see this growth as an opportunity to sustain and strengthen the program and our inter-disciplinary collaboration, and to explore with other Faculties how they might adapt and contextualize the learning designs and resources…
References
Bruning, P. F., and Campion, M. A., 2022. Assessing job crafting competencies to predict tradeoffs between competing outcomes. Human Resource Management, 61(1), 91-116.
Edelman, J. A., Owoyele, B., Santuber, J., and Talbot, A. V., 2021. Designing as performance: Bridging the gap between research and practice in design thinking education. In Design Thinking Research (pp. 75-101). Springer, Cham.
Liedtka, J., Salzman, R., and Azer, D., 2018. The Four-Question Methodology in Action: Laying the Foundation. In Design Thinking for the Greater Good (pp. 245-274). Columbia University Press.
Jaskyte, K., and Liedtka, J., 2022. Design thinking for innovation: Practices and intermediate outcomes. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 32(4), 555-575.
Nobis, F., Stevenson, M. Baregheh, A., and T. Carey (2022). Engaging Students with an Adaptable Model for Workplace Innovation Capability. Anthology of Case Stories. 8th Innovation & Entrepreneurship Teaching Excellence Awards 2022. An Anthology of Case Histories. Remenyi, D. (ed.)
Royalty, A., Chen, H., Roth, B., and Sheppard, S., 2021. Developing a Tool to Measure the Transfer of Design Practice from Training Contexts to Applied Contexts. In Design Thinking Research (pp. 103-121). Springer, Cham.