Context: In the previous blog post in this series expanding on results from our recent project for Canada’s Future Skills Centre, we summarized relevant research we applied on government policies and programs to advance Workplace Innovation. There is a much larger body of research on policies and programs to advance the related theme of “Inclusive Innovation”. In this post, we will explore the links between those two policy areas, and highlight research in areas common to both themes (e.g., expanding innovation opportunities in the workplace for equity-seeking groups).
What is inclusive innovation?
“Innovation is not neutral: it has both a rate and, crucially, a direction. The style of innovation frequently touted as the answer – the ‘move fast and break things’ Silicon Valley version) is often not inclusive at all – it can increase existing social and economic inequality and have unintended environmental consequences.
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Inclusive Innovation addresses a broader range of social goals for innovation, which in practice often focuses on including a broader range of people as both participants in developing innovations and as beneficiaries from innovations (Dutz 2007). There are multiple dimensions in which this broader range can be addressed. For instance, in a 2017 briefing on inclusive innovation policy by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (Planes-Satorra & Paunov 2017), the following dimensions of inclusion are highlighted:
In Demographic terms, inclusion addresses the need to reduce the underrepresentation or exclusion of individuals according to characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and perceived disability status;
Inclusion is also conceived in Geographic terms, with efforts made to increase the innovation participation and benefit for regions. Often, it is rural areas and socio-economically disadvantaged places that are targeted by such approaches;
Industrial and Sectoral dimensions are also considered with the aim of including innovation participants and beneficiaries in more traditional sectors (i.e., outside of sectors such as digital technologies which many current innovation policies privilege).
We will explore some of these broader aspects of Inclusive Innovation in a subsequent post, looking at initiatives to foster Inclusive Innovation at the global, national, regional and city levels. In the sections that follow here, we will focus on our reframing of employee-led innovation as Inclusive Workplace at the Workplace Level and on the links between this work and other Canadian research initiatives on Inclusive Innovation.
Inclusive Innovation at the Workplace Level
Our new language around “Inclusive Workplace Innovation” highlights how our research-to-practice initiatives to advance workplace innovation link to the larger body of research and practice on Inclusive Innovation and to suggest additional ways for employee-led Workplace Innovation to promote more inclusive workplaces. The starting point for our own work on Inclusive Workplace Innovation was the European conception of Employee-led Workplace Innovation.
This has implicitly inclusive elements, with its focus on win-win goals for both the organization and the workforce and on the broader inclusion of employees as both participants and beneficiaries. Viewed in the context of the OECD report referenced above, this suggests an additional element of inclusion:
4. In Job Role terms, Inclusive Innovation moves us from a perception that innovation is a specialized role (restricted to certain job positions) toward an understanding that all employees can be empowered as contributors to innovation in their workplace.
We should also note that past European research on employee-led workplace innovation has also explored aspects of inclusion in the broader senses described above For example, promoting employee-led innovation within workplaces has been combined with advancing innovation activities outside major urban centres (Totterdill 2017; Habibipour et al 2021) and addressing other potential beneficiaries of innovation activities beyond the workplace (such as “community development and environmental responsibility” (Mattieu et al 2) and “sustained impacts at individual enterprise level and across the economy as a whole” (Pot et al 2023).
Some initiatives to promote more inclusive participation in workplace innovation have themselves been instances of employee-led innovation. Future posts in this series will highlight case stories which illustrate how Workplace Innovation practices can advance Inclusive Innovation on the Demographic dimension to include specific groups often excluded or disadvantaged in innovation initiatives:
Participation of neuro-diverse workers in collaborative innovation methods such as Design Thinking (Budree & Kathard 2020)
Participation in workplace innovation projects by older workers (who are often excluded from innovation projects) (Lord & Therriault 2018)
Inclusive Workplace Innovation in Canada
Canada already has strong research centres studying Inclusive Innovation, whose work we have drawn on in our discussion of Inclusive Innovation at the national, regional and city levels. These centres include the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto (Zehavi & Breznitz 2017), the Institute for Science, Society & Policy at the University of Ottawa (Schillo & Robinson 2017) and the Brookfield Institute for Innovation (Munro & Zachariah 2021) recently repositioned within The Dias at Toronto Metropolitan University.
The concept has also transitioned into practice as a tool in policy formation. For example, a recent report for Employment and Social Development Canada on fostering innovation to achieve social goals called on the Government of Canada to embrace a more inclusive view of innovation and to value innovation for social and environmental good at the same level of ambition that it does commercial and technological innovation (ESDC 2018).
At the workplace level, the Inclusive Workplace Innovation theme has appeared in calls to foster more inclusive innovation in Canada by “Recognizing that any worker can be an engine of innovation”. This is Principle 5 in Pathways to Inclusive Innovation: Insights for Ontario and Beyond (Rivera et al 2018), which includes the following expanded commentary:
Workers from different educational and skills backgrounds can contribute to an innovation economy. Workforce training programs that provide foundational and transferable knowledge can prepare participants to adapt more easily to technological change and to directly contribute to process innovation and technology development. In turn, enabling workers to upskill for roles in innovative, technology-intensive firms benefits these firms by increasing their efficiency, competitiveness, and profitability, and allowing them to remain viable in quickly evolving sectors.
There has also been recognition of the need – and opportunity – for Canadian employers to engage their workforces in workplace innovation to advance organizational performance, quality of work life and regional economic development though innovation outside major urban centres (with a special focus on employers in Atlantic Canada) (Pascoe-Deslauriers 2020), and a recent study in Ontario analyzed gaps in recent Ontario initiatives to promote local Makerspaces as a means to advance inclusive innovation (Vinodrai et al, 2021).
Finally, a previous post in this blog also demonstrated another link between our broader Canadian goals for Inclusive Innovation and employee-led innovation at the workplace level. The focus on that post was on the distinctive contributions that graduates from the Liberal Arts and Sciences could bring to workplace innovation, focusing on work-integrated learning placements in curating, synthesizing, and adapting research insights on employee-led innovation to specific workplace contexts. Our plans for this initiative have been aligned with the recent Inclusive Innovation Action Plan of Mitacs (a Canadian innovation agency) to engage more students from equity-seeking groups in workplace innovation.
References
Budree, A., & Kathard, H. (2020). Design thinking for technology supporting individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders in developing countries: Participatory design for inclusivity. In Interdisciplinary approaches to altering neurodevelopmental disorders (pp. 186-199). IGI Global.
Dutz, Mark A.. 2007. Unleashing India's Innovation: Toward Sustainable and Inclusive Growth. © Washington, DC: World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/6856
Employment and Social Development Canada (2018). Inclusive innovation – New ideas and new partnerships for stronger communities. Recommendations of the Social Innovation and Social Finance Strategy Co-Creation Steering Group.
Habibipour, A., Lindberg, J., Runardotter, M., Elmistikawy, Y., Ståhlbröst, A., & Chronéer, D. (2021). Rural living labs: inclusive digital transformation in the countryside. Technology Innovation Management Review, 11(9/10), 59-72.
Lord, M.-M. & Therriault, P.-Y. (2018). Vieillir au travail en context d’innovation : au-delà de la stigmatisation pour des pistes d’intégration (Aging at work in the context of innovation: beyond the stigma for integration). Reflets, 24 (1), 68–97.
Mathieu, C., Albin, M., Abrahamsson, K., and Lagerlöf, E. (2021). European approaches to sustainable work: Editors’ introductory remarks. European Journal of Workplace Innovation, Special Issue on Sustainable Work 6(1-2), 3-7. See also Pot, F., Abrahamsson, K. & Ennals, R. (Eds.), 2022. Sustainable work in Europe. Concepts, conditions, challenges. Peter Lang Publishing.
Munro, D. and Zachariah, J. (2021). Inclusive Innovation Monitor: Tracking growth, inclusion, and distribution for a more prosperous and just society. Brookfield Institute for Innovation, Feb. 2021. https://brookfieldinstitute.ca/wp-content/uploads/Inclusive_Innovation_Monitor-Report.pdf
Planes-Satorra, S. and Paunov, C. (2017). Inclusive innovation policies: Lessons from international case studies. OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers, No. 2017/02, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/a09a3a5d-en.
Pot, F. D., Alasoini, T., Totterdill, P., & Zettel, C. (2023). Towards research-based policy and practice of workplace innovation in Europe. In Oeij, P. R., Dhondt, S., & McMurray, A. J. (Eds.). A Research Agenda for Workplace Innovation: The Challenge of Disruptive Transitions, 253-271.
Rivera, D., Villeneune, S., Breznitz, D. and Zehavi, A. (2018). Pathways to Inclusive Innovation: Insights for Ontario and Beyond. Brookfield Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Schillo, R. S., & Robinson, R. M. (2017). Inclusive innovation in developed countries: The who, what, why, and how. Technology Innovation Management Review, 7(7).
Totterdill, P. (2017). Workplace Innovation as Regional Economic Development: Towards a Movement? IJAR–International Journal of Action Research, 13(2), 9-10.
Vinodrai, T., Nader, B., & Zavarella, C. (2021). Manufacturing space for inclusive innovation? A study of makerspaces in southern Ontario. Local Economy, 36(3), 205-223.
Zehavi, A. & Breznitz, D. (2017). Distribution sensitive innovation policies: conceptualization and empirical examples. Research Policy 46, no. 1 (2017): 327– 336.