The title of this post is borrowed from Steve’s Substack post on Dec 24th (we know: some of you were still busy wrapping presents) was particularly relevant for our work with faculty members in the Humanities and Social Sciences and our “business case” for their students as potential contributors of distinctive value in workplace innovation teams.
In June of 2024, Dr. Juan Carlos López of Acadia University participated in our pre-conference workshop on Helping Students to Develop Capability for Inclusive Innovation in the Workplace: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration at the annual meeting of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) annual meeting in Niagara Falls.
In this series of two posts, we will highlight several of the ongoing EU-wide research projects contributing to the Industry 5.0 vision, supported by the EU Horizon Europe research program.
Too often, organizations treat “knowledge” as something to be managed rather than created. They are missing the deeper opportunity to empower employees as innovators through “knowledge flows”.
In an era defined by technological acceleration, demographic shifts, and sustainability imperatives, Canada’s competitiveness depends on more than capital or technology. It depends on how effectively we create, share, and apply knowledge—and on the capacity of people to innovate in complex, high-stakes environments.
The full results from our 2022-23 applied research project with Canada’s Future Skills Centre are now available on their website.
We’ve copied below the Executive Summary, as well as the Key Insights from the project. You can also download the full report, or read more on the FSC Site for these topics:
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).
In a previous blog post reporting the Results of our research project on Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work, we noted several recommendations regarding Future Directions where further work is needed (beyond the Research-to-Practice knowledge translation processes which were our focus with the individual workplace partners in that project). In forming those recommendations, we also analyzed research insights and exemplary practices from Europe on public policy and programs to advance workplace innovation – that is, we were ourselves engaged in research-to-practice adaptations for our Canadian context. In this post we review some of the experiences from Europe we found to be most relevant.
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.
In a previous blog post reporting the Results of our research project on Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work, we noted three Future Directions where further work is needed (beyond the Research-to-Practice knowledge translation processes which were our focus with the individual workplace partners in that project). In this post we explore the first of those Future Directions: using existing collaborations for regional workforce development as the focal point for supporting research-informed advances in employee-led workplace innovation, by adapting a Living Labs model as the structure for ongoing collaborations.
In a previous post on Results from our research project on Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work, we mentioned the one workplace partner for whom our initial effort to provide a targeted research synthesis was not successful (“ForestCo” in B.C.). They requested a research synthesis with examples of workplace innovation specific to their industry sector. However, our research did not identify insights on inclusive workplace innovation specific to the Forestry context (for reasons explained in that previous post).
We later followed up with a research synthesis on a closely-related issue of interest to ForestCo – Digital Transformation in the Forestry Sector – which also included research references on “why digital transformation requires workplace innovation[i]” and on the potential impact of digital transformation on the demographics (i.e., “male-dominated”) of the Forestry workforce. This research synthesis, whose highlights are summarized
We are now in the final stages of writing up results from our most recent applied research project with workplace partners – sponsored in part by the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Centre. We focused on adapting European research insights and exemplary practices on employee-led Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work into Canadian contexts. Our goal was to determine the applicability of these strategies for scaling up workplace innovation across Canada and to explore supportive public policy to accelerate these advances.
This post summarizes the major results from the project, excerpted from the final Project Report.
Our previous post this month contained highlights from one of our workplace partners who successfully advanced employee-led workplace innovation in their organization by adapting Research-to-Practice insights on Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work from Europe. In this companion post, our team members share highlights from a second workplace partner, EngServ, (a Calgary-based Engineering Services company). Stephen Cohos is a professional engineer and Innovation Project Coordinator. Bios for our WINCan team authors are available here.
We are in the concluding stages of our research project on Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work, undertaken with in collaboration with numerous workplace partners across Canada with the support of the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Centre. You can find background info and interim results in the project blog posts, and we will be posting over the next few months on the Results, Implications and Future Directions.
The project plan was to share with workplace partners curated Research-to-Practice insights on Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work, and to have them create scenarios about how their organization could apply those insights to enhance their employee-led workplace innovation. Two workplace partners went further and have implemented those scenarios; in this post we’ll be sharing highlights from one of those success stories.
In this post, we will highlight three key collaboration processes between our project team and our workplace partners which enabled their mobilization of research into practice. We will then describe the Research-to-Practice Focus points selected by each workplace in that process, to direct our selection of research insights and exemplary practice for advancing the impact of their employee workplace innovation.
In this post, we will present similar reflections re research insights on the remaining three Motivation to Innovate factors identified:
Innovation Results as an (intrinsic) Incentive: Improving Employee Quality of Work Life
Extrinsic Incentives: What is the role of financial or other incentives?
Reducing the Perceived Costs and Risks of Workplace Innovation
Recent research by Terry has helped to clarify for us the factors that influence employee motivation to engage with workplace innovation [Soleas 2020, 2021]. This research adapted a common framework used for assessing motivation in the workplace [Flake et al 2015], and included an initial study with 30 recognized Canadian innovators as interviewees. The resulting prototype survey instrument was then iteratively refined in prototype tests with another 500 Canadians who had been identified as leading innovators in their workplaces.
