Gillian Sudlow
Reflections on Building a Modern 21st Century ...

In Part I of this post, [Dr. Thomas Carey] offered reflections on the discussion paper Building a Modern 21st Century Workforce prepared for Fall 2024 consultations led by the Government of Canada’s Minister of Workplace Development. Those reflections were based on our experiences in the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, fostering collaborations with workplace and higher education partners to advance employee-led innovation in Canada.

This follow-up post complements those previous reflections with insights specific to another emerging focal point for our current collaborations within Canada and beyond: Developing a distinctive role for Canada in Workplace Innovation Skills for Industry 5.0.

Reflections on Building a Modern 21st Century Workforce (Part II—Industry 5.0)
Gillian Sudlow
Reflections on Building a Modern 21st Century ...

In this three-part post, [Dr. Thomas Carey offers his] reflections on the discussion paper Building a Modern 21st Century Workforce prepared for Fall 2024 consultations led by the Government of Canada’s Minister of Workplace Development. These reflections are based on experiences by our team within the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, around our mission to foster collaborations with workplace and higher education partners to advance employee-led innovation in Canadian workplaces.

Reflections on Building a Modern 21st Century Workforce (Part I)
Gillian Sudlow
Helping Students Develop the Communication ...

In this post, Rob Danisch, Communication Studies Professor at the University of Waterloo, reflects on the importance of focusing on teaching creative and critical thinking skills to help students become innovation catalysts …

In my case, I’m a Professor of Communication Studies. This means that my classes focus on the kinds of communication practices that can foster or catalyze innovation. It’s not music we are learning to play, at least not necessarily; we are learning an embodied knowledge about our everyday habits of interaction. And I’ve long wanted to teach the embodied communication practices most helpful for creating a culture of learning and catalyzing innovation.

Helping Students Develop the Communication Skills They Need to Be Innovation Catalysts
Gillian Sudlow
Resources for Building a Sustainable ...

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.

Resources for Building a Sustainable Professional Community for Workplace Innovation Catalysts
Gillian Sudlow
Case Stories of Workplace Innovation for ...

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.

Case Stories of Workplace Innovation for Science Students – Part II

WEtech

Toward a Professional Community for Workplace Innovation Catalysts

Toward a Professional Community for Workplace Innovation Catalysts

In a previous post in this series, we highlighted the activities of impacts of a ‘first-generation’ program to develop employees’ capabilities as workplace innovators, the Innovation Catalyst program offered by WEtech Alliance in the Windsor-Essex region of Ontario from 2018 to 2021. One of the insights emerging from that program – and a follow-on project on Inclusive Workplace Innovation for Quality of Work – was the importance of the emerging professional role of Workplace Innovation Catalyst at the program and organizational level.

In this post, we will discuss some of the challenges which arose in sustaining the program as an ongoing offering and in integrating research-based  insights into the participants’ practice-based knowledge. We will also describe our work-in-progress plans to address those challenges with a new project aiming to better integrate Workplace Innovation into the regional innovation ecosystem in Windsor-Essex, which includes an innovative knowledge-practice network to support the work of professional Workplace Innovation Catalysts.

The Emerging Professional Role of Workplace Innovation Catalyst

The Emerging Professional Role of Workplace Innovation Catalyst

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.