Thomas Carey and Anahita Baregheh
Employee-led Workplace Innovation engages employees from across an organization in a participatory process of innovation, leading to empowering workplace practices and continuing learning and reflection. Employee-led workplace innovation expands an organization’s innovation mandate beyond traditional boundaries, e.g., where innovation may have been thought of as limited to Research and Development or Information Technology units.
While teaching and learning for Entrepreneurship capability is an established activity in postsecondary education, teaching and learning for capability in employee-led Workplace Innovation is a more recent development. Initiatives to develop workplace innovation capability in postsecondary education reflect growing recognition that “innovation and entrepreneurship are not only distinct concepts, but they also play out in postsecondary institutional contexts in different ways” [Selznick 2019]. Postsecondary institutions are beginning to recognize that all students should have opportunities to engage with innovative and entrepreneurial workplace activities [Hamouda 2018; Hero & Lindfors 2019], as a core graduate attribute for the future of work.
A Diverse Collaboration to Develop Graduate Capability for Workplace Innovation
There have been other collaborative efforts in postsecondary education to develop graduate capability (e.g., FUSION) as well as recent collaborations to develop capability in workplace innovation (e.g., FINCODA). These collaborations have typically brought together institutions with similar characteristics in terms of mission, program range and student demographics, with the rationale that sharing learning resources and activities would be simpler across similar institutions.
Our collaboration is based on a different rationale, adapted from exemplary practices for innovation projects: the likelihood of breakthrough innovation is higher when the team is more diverse. We have intentionally sought out collaborating institutions that differ in mission, size, location and student demographics. We have also encouraged them to plan for a diverse mix of course unit and program contexts: curricular and co-curricular, short credentials and program concentrations, etc. Finally, we have built shared learning resources and activities which can be used by a diversity of postsecondary educators: if capability for workplace innovation is to become an attribute to be achieved by all graduates – in parallel with other Power Skills such as critical thinking, teamwork, etc. – we will need to find ways for a broad range of educators to become involved.
Shared Principles Enable Adaptation of Shared Learning Resources and Activities
When shared learning resources and activities are to be used in a diverse set of contexts, some common understanding of the core principles is required to ensure that adaptations do not remove the key properties for success (a requirement that we reinforce in one of our shared resources, on Innovation Adaptation). In our new Instructor’s Guide for Understanding Workplace Innovation, we outline the four common principles underlying the learning design of our shared resources and activities, which allow them to be adaptable across postsecondary education contexts and also adaptable for a variety of work domains:
A progression of innovation activities, growing in complexity, diversity and uncertainty
Online learning resources with example workplace innovation cases across multiple work domains
Innovation activities to develop capability via project tasks, within our own ‘workplace for learning’ in postsecondary education
An emerging framework for the employee capability required for workplace innovation, including Innovation Skills, Knowledge, Mindsets (e.g., Identity, Self-Efficacy and Motivation) and Experiences.
The Instructors Guide also illustrates how these principles are applied in the diverse contexts where our current learning resources are being used to develop capability for employee-led workplace innovation.
Two further resources to support our collaborating academic institutions are currently works-in-progress:
an Adapters Guide, in which we describe some of the ways that these shared resources have been adapted for different postsecondary education environments.
a Partners Guide, where we discuss some of the benefits emerging from collaboration by a diverse mix of institutions and some of the ways we are also collaborating with workplace partners, to help them advance capability development for employee-led innovation.
Acknowledgement: Our project on Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work Life is supported by the Government of Canada’s Future Skills program
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., and Lindfors, E., 2019. Students’ learning experience in a multidisciplinary innovation project. Education+ Training, 61(4), 500-522.
Selznick, B. S. (2019). Developing Innovators: Preparing Twenty‐First Century Graduates for the Idea Economy. New directions for higher education, 2019(188), 81-90.
About the authors
Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst (Academic Partnerships) with the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, and a former Professor and Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo.
Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and WINCan’s Research Director.