In Part I of this post, we provided an overview of a WINCan project with our summer research intern – Kyla, an undergrad in the Integrated Sciences program at McMaster University. The aim was to assess the feasibility of creating case stories to illustrate workplace innovation activities that would be of specific interest to Science students. The previous post discusses source material for illustrative case stories for two of the innovation activities – Job Crafting and Innovation Adaptation – in our adaptable learning resources for Understanding and Applying Workplace Innovation.
We follow up in this post with illustrative case story sources for Design Thinking and Intrapreneurship. We also describe a potential practice case story with which students could engage as a test of their understanding, based on a Design Thinking experiment to improve a biochemistry lab course at McMaster. Our overall conclusion is that there are available resources from which case stories of special interest to Science students could be created, with some caveats as noted below.:
Design Thinking
As noted in Part I of this post, case stories from medical contexts can be of special interest to Science students, especially when the case includes STEM workers beyond medical doctors. The example we chose as an illustration of Design Thinking focused on an interdisciplinary team designing a mobile app to monitor potential fetal radiation dosages amongst women radiographers (Essop et al 2024):
Radiation workers practice in potentially hazardous environments within radiology departments, since ionising radiation is used for diagnostic medical imaging. Pregnant radiographers are considered high-risk individuals due to the increased sensitivity of fetuses’ developing cells.
Several aspects of the published co-design process made it a good source for a case story:
As would be expected, the Design Thinking team included sample users of the proposed app, including women employees from Diagnostic Radiography, Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Therapy. We thought that a valuable point was made in the case story’s addition of other perspectives to the team: managers of radiology units and experts in ionising radiation (e.g., medical physicists).
The Empathize phase of the Design Thinking process revealed many concerns of potential users beyond just dosage levels, which were addressed in the final product.
The Prototyping phase was aided by a special-purpose tool, which supported rapid creation and adaption of mobile app screen shots and also aided in recording team contributions in a timely and in-context manner (Staiano 2022).
Several artifacts from the process are included in the published report (e.g., user personas, screen shots of the evolving prototype) along with an accompanying final product video.
Intrapreneurship
Intrapreneurial innovation activity is the most complex, uncertain and time-consuming of the innovation activities with which our learners engage. Consequently, most intrapreneurship case stories typically focus on a few key issues in the overall process to highlight specific capabilities.
For example, we identified a potential resource which specifically emphasized proactive behaviour and personal initiative for intrapreneurial innovation, via ‘two embedded cases of environmental bottom-up innovation at a large manufacturing company”, involving “employees generating, championing and realizing eco-innovations”. (Weigt-Rohrbec & Linneberg 2019).
One story involved reducing the energy consumption and CO 2 emissions of a . pump motor. The other story began with a goal of reducing water consumption caused by the cooling lubricants used in manufacturing pump parts, but shifted to an emphasis on reducing chemical wastes in the lubricants. Several aspects of these two case stories were well-suited for our purposes:
Eco-innovations can involve a wide range of Science disciplines, e.g., “renewable energy technologies, pollution prevention schemes, waste-management equipment, eco-design products and the adoption of biological materials”
The two case stories were thoroughly researched. For example:
We conducted and transcribed seventeen in-depth interviews from 30 to 60 minutes long (101 hours of material).
Approximately forty hours of field observations provided insights into the production facilities, allowing a better understanding of the technical challenges
Observing the employees’ daily routines and interactions with colleagues and managers provided a realistic view of environmental responsibility at work.
The report on these two case stories emphasizes “Democratizing Innovation Processes”, which is clearly in the spirit of our framing of Inclusive Workplace Innovation.
A Practice Case Story from the Teaching & Learning Workplace (in Science)
We were pleased to identify a case study of Design Thinking applied within the higher ed teaching and learning environment in Science at McMaster University. As described in Part I of this post, a practice case is a test of student understanding after working through a learning resource module, and requires them to respond to issues in a case story and compare their responses with expert guidance. For this purpose, a practice case story from a higher education context has the advantage of being set in a familiar workplace context.
The proposed Practice Case is outlined below as an Appendix. We believe that the familiar context of the case story will make it easier for students to understand the issues arising in the story and to compare their perspectives as “users” with that of the instructors as “designers”…an idea that we hope to pursue in future work. In the description below, we first outline selected elements excerpted from the Design Thinking project report to create a simplified case story, and then describe how we could engage Science students with this story as a practice case to aid self-assessment of their understanding of the innovation activities involved.
Conclusion: Our overall conclusion was positive about the feasibility of creating innovation case stories with specific appeal to Science students was positive – there are available resources from which case stories of interest to Science students could be created – but with two caveats:
The broad range of occupational paths suggested for Science students requires case stories which focus less on specific work practices than would be true for more vocation-focused domains (such as the Accountancy examples we previously studied)
Our focus in workplace innovation activities is on win-win innovations that improve both organizational performance for the employer and quality of work life for the employees involved. We observed that most references to quality of work life in Science-related jobs seem to deal with safety and health issues, a narrower range of issues than in other technical domains (e.g., information technology or engineering). One notable – and novel – exception is a discussion of the similarities between chemical reactions and work team processes (Berna & Miranda 2022): we’re not at all sure what to make of this!
Appendix – Key elements of the proposed Practice Case for Science Students
Context: The case story is based on an innovation study to improve the impact of a laboratory course (Inquiry in Biochemical Techniques) in a Science program at a Canadian university. Italicized text below is adapted from a report on the study (Hemmerich, De Paoli & Fleisig 2023).
Empathizing: To empathize with students and understand the learning challenges from their perspectives, the instructors conducted individual, open-ended interviews with a sample set of students. An empathy map…was used by the instructors to analyze what participants said, did, thought, and felt to allow the instructors to identify students’ needs.
Defining: Based on the Empathy Map analysis (Grau & Rockett 2022), the instructors defined a design focus on enhancing student capability in iterative learning, as a process to gradually master a specific scientific technique. (This is often labelled as “learning from failure”, but is better framed in an innovation context – where iterative learning is the norm – as “learning to be surprised” (Jordon 2010)).
Despite students acknowledging that their instructors encouraged them to make mistakes and learn from failure within, they still indicated that they struggled with this practice. Personal grade requirements, previous training, and their perceptions of the student-instructor relationship contributed to expectations that they needed to achieve “success” in their first attempt at a course task (for example, an experiment works as intended).
Ideating: The instructors generated ‘How might we’ (HMW) in a brainstorming session and selected the most promising HMWs according to the sense of opportunity conveyed in relation to the most meaningful insights about student needs.
Prototyping, testing and improving: Low-fidelity prototypes were generated by the instructors to convey how the ideas could be integrated into a reimagined learning experience for students. Students from the initial interviews were then invited to join small focus group discussions to share their feedback and contribute their own ideas on the prototypes of the reimagined learning experiences.
The specific themes and challenges previously identified were related to a fear of vulnerability. Participants indicated they would be more comfortable sharing their mistakes and associated learning if it was for the benefit of other students such as the next class cohort. Sharing their failures also required a low-stakes environment without any perceived judgment.
Reflecting: The instructors reflections on the emerging theme of vulnerability and on the process of empathetic design to reimagine student learning highlighted the effectiveness of instructors co-learning with students for greater impact on both teaching and learning. By being vulnerable with students and being curious about their learning experiences, educators made it easier for students to be vulnerable with them, and also supported their creative confidence.
Outline of the proposed Questions and Expert Responses for Self-Assessment
Inclusive Workplace Innovation focuses on broadening the range of people participating in and benefiting from an innovation. The students are the primary beneficiaries from the planned improvements to the course design in the case story. However, their role as participants was limited to the Empathizing and Testing activities. The two questions below ask you to (A) consider the issues within the described case story which may have impeded fuller student participation in the innovation activities and (B) describe how students might have participated more fully in a revised scenario, where those limited factors were not present.
A: What factors in the case story context do you think would have made it difficult to involve students more fully in the Design Thinking innovation activities?
Possible responses (provided in the online module after students have submitted their answer):
Students in the course likely did not have the necessary innovation capability to take on fuller roles in the Design Thinking process. Many students would also not be able to take on the additional work involved in addition to their normal coursework commitments.
The instructors may also not have had the necessary experience or time required to engage students in a more inclusive Design Thinking process.
You may have also considered the ‘power imbalance’ between instructors and students, which could lead to reluctance for students to identify shortcomings in the teaching and learning process. In the actual study on which this case is based, there two separate courses involved in the study and no instructors interacted with their own students in interviews or focus group.
B: Consider a revised scenario in which you were one of the students participating in the course redesign, in parallel with taking the ATS2211 course on Understanding and Applying Workplace Innovation. You are offered the option of fuller inclusion in the Biochemistry Design Thinking project as part of the assigned project work in ATS2211.
Describe the additional involvement in the Design Thinking project activities outlined above which would appeal to you, as opportunities to enhance your capability and to have an impact on future students (as well as to bolster your resumé list of innovation experiences!). Note also how this more inclusive approach could improve the scope and impact of the innovation
References
Berna, À., & Miranda, G. (2022). Analogies Between Chemical Reactions and Quality of Workplace Environment. Natural Science & Advanced Technology Education, 31(2).
Essop, H., Kekana, R., & Smuts, H. (2024). Co-designing of a prototype mobile application for fetal radiation dose monitoring among pregnant radiographers using a design thinking approach. Health Informatics Journal, 30(3).
Grau, S. L., & Rockett, T. (2022). Creating student-centred experiences: Using design thinking to create student engagement. The Journal of Entrepreneurship, 31(2_suppl), S135-S159.
Hemmerich, A., De Paoli, M., & Fleisig, R. V. (2023). Design thinking in collaboration with students to identify and address learning challenges in two science and engineering courses. In 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition (June). DT+ ED
Jordan, S. (2010). Learning to be surprised: How to foster reflective practice in a high-reliability context. Management learning, 41(4), 391-413.
Staiano F. (2022) Designing and prototyping interfaces with Figma: learn essential Ux/UI design principles by creating interactive prototypes for mobile, tablet, and desktop. Birmingham: Packet Publishing Ltd.
Weigt-Rohrbeck, J., & Linneberg, M. S. (2019). Democratizing innovation processes: personal initiative in bottom-up eco-innovation. European Journal of Innovation Management, 22(5), 821-844. MS