Supporting Resources for:
Toward a Sustainable Professional Community for Workplace Innovation Catalysts (a presentation at the EUWIN Conference on the Future of Workplace Innovation, Oct 2, 2024)
Our WINCan team was delighted to be invited to present our current work at the October conference of the EU’s Workplace Innovation Network on The Future of Work. The focus of the presentation was our recent progress on establishing a sustainable Professional Community for Workplace Innovation Catalysts in the Windsor-Essex region, including the larger plan to integrate workplace innovation as a key enabling element in the region’s Innovation Ecosystem.
We have worked with EUWIN colleagues in previous applied research to advance workplace innovation within Canadian workplaces. However, for most conference attendees this was their initial introduction to the adaptation of European research insights in Canadian contexts. We provided a URL link to this blog post at the conference, so that attendees interested in specific aspects of our work would be able to quickly find further information.
A condensed version of the presentation slide deck is available here (animations removed).
This blog post contains brief introductions and supporting URLs for the following topics:
Workplace Innovation Network for Canada (WINCan) and the presentation authors
The role of Workplace Innovation Catalysts at the program and organizational levels
Building Blocks for a sustainable professional community of practice
Integrating workplace innovation into a Regional Innovation Ecosystem
How Tertiary Education can support Workplace Innovation Catalysts (and vice versa)
1. The Workplace Innovation Network Canada (WINCan)
WINCan was established as a collaborative project with workplace and higher education partners in 2017 and incorporated as a not-for-profit company in 2019. The WINCan mission is to leverage Canada’s exemplary level of attainment in higher education to build a more innovative Canadian workforce, by enabling employee and organizational capability for workplace innovation.
Inspired by research and practice from the EU Workplace Innovation Network, our vision of Workplace Innovation is the social process of creating lasting value by mobilizing new ideas for better work – improving both organizational performance and the quality of work life for employees.
Contact Information: Dr. Thomas Carey, tcarey@uwaterloo.ca
Other authors: Adam Frye, Barry Leavitt, and Dr. Anahita Baregheh
2. History
Our initial pilot explorations with employers and educators on Canada’s west coast (2017-18) was followed by the following projects:
a joint project with workplaces and academic institutions in Ontario (2018-19) to specify a progressive sequence of workplace innovation activities and employee capabilities;
a Minimum Viable Product prototype university course in Melbourne Australia (2020) to help postsecondary students and working learners develop those capabilities;
a growing collaboration of diverse postsecondary institutions – from 2 in 2022 to 16 in 2025 – helping students and working learners to develop their innovation capability;
an applied research project on Inclusive Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work, with support from the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Centre, WEtech Alliance in Ontario, workplace partners across Canada and Workplace Innovation Europe (2022-23).
The presentation at the EUWIN conference focused on several aspects of our current work:
3. Building on Past Work
We are building on past Innovation Catalyst development at WEtech Alliance and the FSC project’s identification of important employee capabilities required to enable programs and organizational structure to develop and support fellow employees as workplace innovators.
4. Developing a Community of Catalysts
We are developing a professional community of Workplace Innovation Catalysts that can be self-sustaining both socially and financially, with a Minimum Viable Product prototype scheduled to launch in January 2025.
5. Integrating Workplace Innovation into a Regional Innovation Ecosystem
We are collaborating with regional social and economic development agencies to explore the integration of workplace innovation into the regional innovation ecosystem in Windsor-Essex (southwestern Ontario). A key aspect of this is creation of comparative advantage (within North America) for Industry 5.0 and other leading-edge capabilities from research in Europe.
We had originally framed the challenge here simplistically as:
“What Stakeholder organization(s) should be responsible for fostering Workplace Innovation within Windsor-Essex workplaces”.
That focus has now shifted to:
“What strategic interventions in the regional innovation ecosystem can integrate and leverage Workplace Innovation to increase ecosystem innovation productivity”.
A major impetus for this reframing has been our analysis of a public policy initiative in the U.S., the Regional Innovation Engines (RIE) program (NSF 2024), which is intended to support government investment in strategic interventions (i.e., “Engines” in the NSF terminology) to enhance the innovation productivity and impacts of specific regional innovation ecosystems. Despite a focus on scientific and technological innovation, the RIE program has a strong place-based approach and goals for engaging a diverse workforce and addressing both economic and social challenges.
An analysis of the RIE approach by experts in regional innovation ecosystems (Guzman, Murray et al 2024) articulates the ‘theory of change’ embedded in the RIE program, how the Engines will induce changes in Stakeholder behavior, and what changes in Stakeholder access to resources, capabilities, and knowledge must occur for the Engine to reach its objectives. The step-by-step design process addresses three interrelated challenges:
Holistic assessment of the ecosystem’s latent strengths and weaknesses;
A viable and assessable strategic program for the proposed Engine to enhance Stakeholder roles, capabilities and relationships;
Ensuring Stakeholder engagement and commitment for those proposed enhancements.
In planning the initiatives described in previous sections, we have been adapting the steps outlined in (Guzman Murray et al 2024) for processes such as “Identifying necessary conditions for realizing the potential of an Engine intervention” and “Designing and Implementing an Engine”. E.g., the reframing of the challenge at the beginning of this section was based on the repeated demonstrations in (Guzman Murray et al 2024) that “No one is in charge of innovation…no one organization, and certainly not the Engine itself, can require individuals across the ecosystem to engage in a way that facilitates the changes in behavior the intervention seeks to induce” (p. 32).
We look forward to further discussion about the impacts of these adaptations.
6. How Tertiary Education can support Workplace Innovation Catalysts (and vice versa)
One resource for this comparative advantage is the position of Windsor-Essex as a hub for our initiatives in postsecondary education. E.g., members of the professional community of Workplace Innovation Catalysts can be ideal hosts for student involvement in experiential and work-integrated learning around workplace innovation. In parallel, the availability of students as research-to-practice intermediaries can accelerate the adaptation of research insights and exemplary practices from beyond the region (including from work by EUWIN members).
Our 2023 article in the European Journal of Workplace Innovation is the best introduction to the way our diverse collaboration of postsecondary programs and instructors adapts shared learning resources and activities for developing workplace innovation capability in their distinctive contexts (with students and working learners). The article highlights work by two of the early partners, in a Faculty of Arts at a prominent research university in Melbourne (Australia) and a School of Business in a teaching-oriented university in northern Ontario (Canada).
That collaboration also won an award in the 2022 Innovation and Entrepreneurship Teaching Excellence competition in Europe. We have since continued to expand both the number and the diversity of partners –from 2 in 2022 to 4 in 2023, 8 in 2024 – and are on track for offerings in 16 distinctive postsecondary education contexts in 2025.
References:
Guzman, J., Murray, F., Stern, S., & Williams, H. (2024). Accelerating innovation ecosystems: The promise and challenges of regional innovation engines. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy, 3(1), 9-75.
National Science Foundation (2024). Regional Innovation Engines: a unique program to grow and sustain regional innovation. Jan 29, 2024. https://new.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/regional-innovation-engines