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

innovation capability

Workplace Innovation: From Goals to Game Plans

Workplace Innovation: From Goals to Game Plans

In this post, we’ll summarize the From Goals to Game Plan process to advance employee-led innovation in our partner organizations, which has emerged from the cases we have been working on with a set of initial representative workplaces. We’ll also illustrate our own use of such research insights and exemplary practices in developing this framework for two purposes:

  • as an organizing structure for our workshops to help partner workplaces to identify where and how they want to advance workplace innovation with their employees

  • and later as the organizing framework for two key outputs from the Workplace Innovation and Quality of Work Life project, a Research Adaptation Synthesis and its accompanying illustrative Case Stories from participating workplaces.

Workplace Innovation as an Example of Expanding “Ways of Knowing” in Polytechnic Education

Workplace Innovation as an Example of Expanding “Ways of Knowing” in Polytechnic Education

The value of Workplace Innovation in preparing graduates for the Future of Work has been explored from different angles in our WINCan work and in this blog. Here we consider the implications of developing “every graduate” innovation capability on prevailing ‘ways of knowing’ in higher education. Our focus will be on polytechnic education and institutions, and how in that context including workplace innovation capability as a graduate outcome prompts us to:

  • expand our conception of knowledge as driven solely by technology, and to

  • discover new ways of working beyond traditional vocational and professional domains.

Introducing Workplace Innovation Capability in Higher Education

Introducing Workplace Innovation Capability in Higher Education

One of our key WINCan WOW factors is the concept of using our higher education “workplaces for  learning” as experiential learning opportunities in workplace innovation. That is, te introduction of a new teaching and learning practice can become a ‘teachable moment’ for students to develop their skills, knowledge, and mindsets for workplace innovation. In this post, Tom Carey and our pilot project team leader Farhad Dastur describe our initial pilot studies to test and refine this idea, hosted by Kwantlen Polytechnic University as the lead for a planned collaborative effort within the B.C. Association of Colleges and Universities.