Thomas Carey and Anahita Baregheh
In a previous post summarizing the Results of our recent project on Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work, we described Research-to-Practice Case Story experiences with our workplace partners. These experiences demonstrated how research insights from Europe – and some from Canada – can be adapted to advance employee-led workplace innovation in Canadian workplaces. We also noted some of the Implications to be addressed if we are to successfully scale up those interactions with a broader range of workplace partners.
The key implication for Scaling Up emerged over time. Our initial case stories were developed by Innovation leaders who had developed a sense of professional identity around their innovation leadership role. They demonstrated capability and interest in understanding the research evidence to address their organizational priorities and pain points. They also could create their own business case for implementing the scenarios within their organizations, with only modest support from our research team.
In later case stories, as we extended participation to a broader range of workplaces, we observed gaps in both the initial understanding of workplace innovation and in the partner organization’s absorptive capacity for research adaptation in their specific context. This meant that more support from our research team was necessary to help the workplaces identify their key priorities and pain points, and to develop research-to-practice scenarios to address them..
We developed a workshop, Workplace Innovation: From Goals to Game Plans, to support these workplaces that were less experienced with workplace innovation. While this additional assistance helped in their organizational journeys, each partner workplace still required a level of effort from our team to support their research adaptations that we recognized could be a barrier to wider scale-up and dissemination. This was particularly evident with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) without employee roles focused on enabling and supporting innovation in the workplace.
We outline in this post our recommended Future Directions to address this challenge: using a structured sequence of work placements to enable higher education students to serve as catalysts for Research-to-Practice knowledge adaptation with workplace partners. In the emerging practice area of Workplace Innovation, a two-way exchange on new insights can be particularly valuable – with academic partners promoting knowledge diffusion from applied research and workplace partners demonstrating how new exemplary practices can be adapted for alignment with their specific contexts.
Past research by others has shown how students can also contribute to this two-way diffusion of knowledge about innovation in the workplace, e.g., for technical college students on work placements [Hodge & Smith 2019]. In this post we outline our Future Directions plan to develop student capability as catalysts to advance employee-led innovation in the workplace.
Work-Integrated Learning to advance innovation capability in the workplace
Our academic partners have already made significant advances in developing “every employee” capability for graduates to engage with innovation in the workplace. Our foundational learning resources and activities for Understanding Workplace Innovation are being re-used or adapted by a growing number of institutions – 2 in 2022, 4 in 2023, and 8 expected in 2024 – and have been recognized internationally for Excellence in Teaching for Innovation [Nobis et al 2022].
Many of our academic partners also want to provide further preparation for graduates who will serve as enablers and catalysts for employee-led workplace innovation. In some workplaces, this may be a specialized role comprising most or all of an employee’s workload, as with the Coach role in the IBM Enterprise version of Design Thinking. In one recent adaptation of our learning activities and resources for workplace innovation – for the Arts and Sciences Internship Program at the University of Toronto – the lead workplace partner, IBM Canada, has a very mature workplace innovation program and is an ideal workplace setting for undergraduate students to be mentored in a company’s use of leading-edge professional innovation practices.
In our research project on Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work, organizations with such innovation catalyst employee roles were better positioned to engage with adaptation of research insights and exemplary practices. However, for other companies the innovation enabler or catalyst role is more likely to be a supplement to other work duties and less likely to be part of a long-term professional identity. And in many workplaces, the concept of employee-led workplace innovation is still emerging and deciding on a ‘next step’ goal can be challenging.
Our proposed Future Direction to scale up research-to-Practice adaptation include bridging these gaps in expertise with work-integrated learning placements for higher education students from a specialized stream preparing them for roles as workplace innovation enablers and catalysts (whether as a small or large element in their overall work responsibilities).
This approach also promises additional benefits for academic partners, by addressing two of our goals which were previously hard to reconcile:
expand opportunities for student experiential learning through external placements with high-quality workplace innovation programs; and
broaden their institution’s impact on regional development by helping employers (especially SMEs) to develop more innovative workforces.
For example, one of our academic partners developed a Workplace Innovation Practicum to follow the foundational Understanding Workplace Innovation course unit. For external workplaces with mature workplace innovation programs, it was unclear what value the students could immediately contribute; for SMEs where workplace innovation programs were new initiatives, there were concerns that students would not be exposed to a range of research-based exemplary practices.
However, if WIL placements involve students as intermediaries in the Research-to-Practice process then they (i) will be exposed to research-based exemplary practices and (ii) can provide value to the workplace partner by helping with the curation, translation and adaptation of relevant research insights for their specific workplace context.
What might this look like: a potential scenario for one institutional context
We already have some examples of undergraduate students serving as knowledge mobilization catalysts to bring Research-to-Practice insights into their workplaces. In her School of Business program in a Canadian regional university, Anahita has noted that the presence of working learners in the course units has led to dissemination and application of new ideas for workplace innovation in their employment contexts. In addition, a student research assistant disseminated ideas from our learning resources and activities into her initial employment workplace and engaged an experienced colleague in creating learning cases in workplace innovation specific to their professional work domain (Accountancy).
One of our academic institutions has sketched out the following scenario as a starting point in developing a proof-of-concept test case, for a follow-on course unit on Advancing Employee-led Innovation in the Workplace and WIL placements to support the complementary goals of workplace leaders, innovation instructors and students, and applied researchers:
Learning resources and activities on advancing employee-led workplace innovation, including possible modules on topics such as:
principles and case studies of Organizational Capability for workplace innovation [e.g., Totterdill & Exton 2014]
exemplary practices and case studies of Innovation Catalyst roles to enable and support employee innovation
principles and case studies of Research-to-Practice knowledge mobilization (and its relationship to Innovation Adaptation)
Initial exposure to workplace innovation contexts in one or more regional workplaces:
E.g., job-shadowing or micro-internship experiences, one day per week for 3-4 weeks
Work-integrated learning placement (Innovation Intern? Innovation Concierge? [Noble et al 2019]) in one of those workplaces, e.g.:
Participation with workplace leaders in a Workplace Innovation: From Goals to Game Plans workshop, which we developed and tested in our research project
Assisting in identifying and curating research relevant to the organization’s Goals
Assisting in contextualizing insights and exemplary practices into use case scenarios
Assisting in pitching and implementing the scenario and/or assessing the results
Even within this single scenario sketch, there are many open questions on how these components might fit together, e.g.:
as a Special Topics course followed by a Workplace Innovation Practicum,
as an individual or team learning experience,
as a short-term or full-term placement,
whether the initial micro-internship exposure is part of the Special Topics course or the Practicum, etc.
at least one of our academic partners has a significant number of working learners in their foundational course unit on Understanding Workplace Innovation, and most have students who are working part-time off campus. These learners are already doing some of the assigned work in that initial course unit within their own workplace contexts. How could we make additional opportunities as innovation enablers and catalysts available to them in those workplaces?
This is another illustration of the value of a diverse collaboration of academic institutions with different contexts (mission, geography, demographics, discipline areas involved) in which various scenarios can be tested.
Acknowledgement:
The Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work research project was supported in part by the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Centre.
References:
Hodge, S., & Smith, R. (2019). Innovation and VET student work placement. Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 71(4), 519-537.
Nobis, F., Stevenson, M. Baregheh, A., and Carey, T. (2022). Engaging Students with an Adaptable Model for Workplace Innovation Capability. Anthology of Case Stories. Innovation & Entrepreneurship Teaching Excellence Awards 2022. An Anthology of Case Histories. Remenyi, D. (ed.).
Noble, D., Charles, M. B., & Keast, R. (2019). Research on concierge services for startups and young businesses: A report for NSW Department of Industry, Procurement registration number 19-348. Southern Cross University (Australia).
Totterdill, P. and Exton, R. (2014). Defining workplace innovation: The fifth element. Strategic Direction, 30(9), pp.12-16.
About the Authors
Thomas Carey is the Co-Principal Catalyst for Academic Partnerships with the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada (WINCan) and an academic leader who has directed numerous multi-institution innovation projects across academic and workplace sectors in Canada and the U.S..
Anahita Baregheh is WINCan’s Research Director, an Associate Professor in Nipissing University’s School of Business and a former consultant on innovation with SMEs in the U.K.