WEtech Alliance is the regional innovation centre for Windsor-Essex, and co-leader with the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada on last year’s applied research project on Inclusive Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work (supported by the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Program). WEtech team members brought to that project our expertise from the creation and successful evolution of an “Innovation Catalyst” program from 2018 to 2020 (when it was disrupted by the Covid pandemic).
Amongst the insights from the FSC research – with workplaces across Canada – was recognition of an emerging professional role for Workplace Innovation Catalysts at the program and organizational level, who could encourage, enable and support workplace innovation initiated and led by other employees [Carey, Frye et al 2023]. In this post, we will highlight the activities and impacts of the WEtech Innovation Catalyst program and describe some of what we learned about the Workplace Innovation Catalyst role during our research collaboration.
In a subsequent post in this series, we will discuss some of the challenges which arose in sustaining the program and in integrating research-based insights into the participants’ practice-based knowledge. We will also describe our plans to address those challenges with a new project aiming to better integrate Workplace Innovation into the regional innovation ecosystem in Windsor-Essex.
The WEtech Innovation Catalyst program: a brief history
In 2018, WEtech Alliance developed a new initiative called Innovation Catalyst, which traineds frontline staff in large companies and organizations across Windsor-Essex and Chatham-Kent to become internal engines of innovation. ENWIN Utilities was the first organization to complete the program, with Schlegel Villages long-term care and the Greater Essex County District School Board following in 2019. A targeted all-female cohort was added later, composed of staff in Human Resources management at regional companies who belonged to the Automate Canada industry association.
In the Innovation Catalyst cohort model, each company recruits fifteen staff representing different departments, to be trained in the process and practise of innovative thinking as Innovation Catalysts. For example ,at the municipality-owned utility, ENWIN, the cohort included staff from their call centre, line crews, warehousing, logistics, HR and IT, among others. The employees then fan-out into the organization searching for challenges and improvements, which they bring back and refine into solutions before wrapping them in a business case that they pitch to the CEO and the Executives.
What made Innovation Catalyst unique, compared to other corporate innovation boot-camps that are typically held over a weekend, is the intensity and duration of the program, which takes up to one year to complete. “We slow cook innovation,” I said at the time (in my role as Director of Business Innovation at WEtech Alliance and the program leader). “We take time to make sure we bring on organizations that are ready to make that commitment to their frontline staff.”
Activities in Innovation Catalyst program
This is how I initially described the activities of an Innovation Catalyst cohort:
All of the participants in the cohort will bring opportunities and challenges that they are passionate about solving, and over the course of three months we will leverage a Design Thinking framework to actually dive in and start to understand how they might be solved. By the end of their three-month design thinking journey, leaders will have developed a strong mentoring network with whom best practices can be shared.
We also expect that participants will be able to drive continuous improvement within their organizations while at the same time improving efficiencies and quality. It’s not about the solutions to the challenges they bring into the program but about learning a new way of solving problems, building internal networks at their organizations, and a peer network to lean on throughout their career. For the organizations, there will be a group of leaders capable of solving real challenges quickly and efficiently, as well as new innovative pathways opening up within.
Innovation Catalyst was intended to target larger organizations and companies, both public and private, no matter the sector – whether manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare or education. The projects developed by employees addressed challenges in their workplaces. You can see examples of the innovation projects at each organization and employees’ reflections on them in these video vignettes from cohorts from the industrial automation sector, the municipal utility, a long-term care network and the county School Boards.
Outcomes of the Innovation Catalyst program
Leaders at several of our participating companies provided reflections on their experiences with the program for a WEtech media release. “We know our employees have the hands-on expertise to drive improvements in customer service and efficiency,” said Helga Reidel, the then CEO of ENWIN. “Innovation Catalyst provided the training to hone those ideas, as well as a platform for frontline staff to get their ideas heard at the top.”
“I was very impressed by the quality and creativity of our employees’ pitches, but what stood out for me is the level of teamwork across departments,” says Reidel. “We are now in the process of implementing a number of the innovations that were presented, and we couldn’t be more pleased.”
In addition to generating ideas that improve service and efficiency, Innovation Catalyst improves employee engagement. “It was an incredibly rewarding process, added Justin Pulleyblank, ENWIN’s Supervisor of Water Distribution. “From day one it was apparent that our executive team valued the ideas we were bringing forward. When you know you’re being heard and taken seriously, that’s very encouraging and motivating.”
“Innovation increases prosperity in our region by strengthening companies and organizations from within,” says Yvonne Pilon, President and CEO of WEtech Alliance. “Companies we talk to are looking to tap into the innovation potential of their frontline staff, and at the same time they look to increase employee engagement and retention”.
The emerging professional role of Workplace Innovation Catalyst
Most of the staff in the six-month to one-year programs continued in their jobs with workplace innovation as a self-initiated complementary activity; however, some staff were assigned new roles as focal points and enablers for innovation across the organization. These roles could be part-time or full-time and had a variety of ad hoc titles (or none at all). For example, one organizational catalyst – a Human Resources Services manager – later won an award from her industry association for her work as a “Workplace Culture Innovator”.
In our follow-up project on Inclusive Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work, our applied research team included members from the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, WEtech Alliance and Workplace Innovation Europe. We studied how research insights and practices from Europe could be adapted for Canadian workplace contexts. The activities and results from that research are described in another blog post series, including a Case Story on extending the Innovation Catalyst work at Windsor’s municipality-owned utility, ENWIN.
One result from the workplace case studies, with ENWIN and others, was that research adaptation was enabled by a sense of employee professional identity as a Workplace Innovation Catalyst at the program and/or organizational level. We had not explicitly targeted this role in our initial Innovation Catalyst program. However, on reflection, we saw that the organizations in which it had been recognized and supported were becoming leaders in employee-led workplace innovation, with examples from our own Innovation Catalyst program and beyond.
As we considered how to follow up on the Innovation Catalyst “version 1” program after the Covid disruption had receded, we realized that the Innovation Catalyst enabler role at the organizational and program level would be critical would be critical in scaling up and sustaining a long-term initiative. In a subsequent post [2024.07] in this series, we will discuss some of the challenges which arose as we planned how to enhance the program – e.g., integrating research-based insights into the participants’ practice-based knowledge – and how to sustain it at a regional level. We will also describe our plans to address those challenges with a new project aiming to better integrate Workplace Innovation into the regional innovation ecosystem in Windsor-Essex.
References
Carey, T., Frye, A., Melnick, B., Baregheh, A., Anderson, T., Abboud, V., Castela Lopes, N., Iyilade, Y., Soleas, E. and Totterdill, P. (2023) Inclusive Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work, Government of Canada Future Skills Centre. https://fsc-ccf.ca/projects/workplace-innovation-for-quality-of-work/