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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Workplace innovation capability
Many of the higher education programs and instructors who are partnering with us want to incorporate Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) options into their development of student workplace innovation capability. In this post, we describe three different work-integrated learning opportunities in which initiatives are currently underway.
While teaching and learning for Entrepreneurship capability is an established activity in postsecondary education, teaching and learning for capability in employee-led Workplace Innovation is a more recent development. Initiatives to develop workplace innovation capability in postsecondary education reflect growing recognition that “innovation and entrepreneurship are not only distinct concepts, but they also play out in postsecondary institutional contexts in different ways” [Selznick 2019].
Our course units in Faculties of Arts demonstrate the feasibility of enhancing B.A. programs to develop student capability for workplace innovation, extending other generic capabilities for employability currently being developed in those programs [Causevic 2022]. In this post, we address two issues about such B.A. program enhancements, as raised with us by postsecondary academic staff in B.A. programs which do not have a specialist vocational or professional focus (e.g., those labelled in Australia as a “generalist B.A.” [Gannaway & Sheppard 2019] and in North America as “Liberal Arts” programs).
In our post in this weblog last month, we highlighted our inclusion amongst the finalists for the 2022 Innovation and Entrepreneurship Teaching Excellence award in Europe. One element of this final stage was the preparation of a book chapter to be included in the finalists’ Anthology of Case Studies to be published as part of the award process.
