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.
In part I of this two-part series, we described the context and content of reusable course modules to introduce higher education students to Employee-Led Innovation in the Workplace, and how the modules were deployed in a course unit at a university School of Business.
In this follow-on post, we will also explore our initial methods for assessing the development of learner capability for workplace innovation, including use of a new workplace tool for assessing aspects of innovation mindsets.
One year ago, we began a WINCan project to explore how we could create resources, activities and experiences for adaptable teaching and learning resources which Higher Education institutions could adapt for teaching and learning for Workplace Innovation.
We were basing our project on an Instructional Design for adaptability developed in a previous Ontario-based project with six Ontario colleges and universities and six workplace partners from the corporate and public sectors. We also applied what we had learned in working with our collaborating institution in Melbourne (Australia) in co-developing their pioneering course unit on Understanding Workplace Innovation.
In this series of two posts, we will focus on what we’ve learned over the last year from adapting teaching and learning resources for Workplace Innovation in Higher Education. Our aim is to help Canadian institutions move toward the goal of “Every Graduate Can be an Innovation Enabler” with flexible resources and formats
