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

academic-workplace collaboration

Leveraging a Diverse Academic Collaboration for Capability in Inclusive Workplace Innovation (part II)

Leveraging a Diverse Academic Collaboration for Capability in Inclusive Workplace Innovation (part II)

In previous posts we summarized our rationale for engaging a diverse set of academic institutions to collaborate on developing capability in Inclusive Workplace Innovation. We also highlighted the international recognition for our initial collaboration via our European award for  Innovation and Entrepreneurship Teaching Excellence in September 2022.

This month our scholarly article on that initial collaboration was published in the open-access  European Journal of Workplace Innovation (Vol 8, Issue 1). The Editor’s introduction to the Issue highlights how  its contents reflect a wider diffusion of Workplace Innovation beyond its European origins:

Collaborating on Workplace Innovation Capability in ‘The Future of the B.A.’

Collaborating on Workplace Innovation Capability in ‘The Future of the B.A.’

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).