Gillian Sudlow
EU Horizon Europe Projects to Advance Industry ...

In a previous post in this series, we highlighted several of the ongoing EU-wide research projects contributing to the Industry 5.0 vision, supported by the EU Horizon Europe research program. In this post we will add summaries of additional EU research projects addressing similar themes, including those from another EU research programs.

EU Horizon Europe Projects to Advance Industry 5.0 (Part II)
Gillian Sudlow
EU Horizon Europe Projects to Advance Industry ...

In this series of two posts, we will highlight several of the ongoing EU-wide research projects contributing to the Industry 5.0 vision, supported by the EU Horizon Europe research program.

EU Horizon Europe Projects to Advance Industry 5.0 (Part I)
Gillian Sudlow
Humanities Don’t Have a Relevance Problem—They ...

The title of this post is borrowed from Steve’s Substack post on Dec 24th (we know: some of you were still busy wrapping presents) was particularly relevant for our work with faculty members in the Humanities and Social Sciences and our “business case” for their students as potential contributors of distinctive value in workplace innovation teams.

Humanities Don’t Have a Relevance Problem—They Have a Preparation Problem
Gillian Sudlow
WINCan Academic Partner Honoured with a CAUT ...

In June of 2024, Dr. Juan Carlos López of Acadia University participated in our pre-conference workshop on Helping Students to Develop Capability for Inclusive Innovation in the Workplace: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration at the annual meeting of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) annual meeting in Niagara Falls.

WINCan Academic Partner Honoured with a CAUT Equity Award
Gillian Sudlow
The Idea-Centric Firm: How Employee-led ...

Too often, organizations treat “knowledge” as something to be managed rather than created. They are missing the deeper opportunity to empower employees as innovators through  “knowledge flows”.

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The Idea-Centric Firm: How Employee-led Innovation and Knowledge Management Drive Quality and Performance

What We’re Learning for the Adaptability of Insights on Strategic Innovation Across Sectors

What We’re Learning for the Adaptability of Insights on Strategic Innovation Across Sectors

Here are some highlights from what we learned in the process of creating and analyzing these scenarios as a proof-of-concept tests. Some of the research insights from the corporate sector that we had expected to be useful did provide value in the scenarios, at times in surprising ways. Other research insights did not align with the context of the scenario institutions, although we noted other contexts where they might contribute value. We’ll focus here on the issues in Talent Management for Strategic Innovation which emerged in the scenarios; important insights also arose in the broader area of Governance and Management of Strategic Innovation.

Looking Back at 2020 Milestones and Looking Forward to 2021 New Ventures

Looking Back at 2020 Milestones and Looking Forward to 2021 New Ventures

As we head into 2021, we thought it would be a good time to celebrate our WINCan accomplishments in 2020 and look forward to some of our new ventures. One of the new initiatives we had on our exploration list for 2020 a year ago has blossomed, some of our ongoing projects reached important milestones, and we also have new ventures now emerging.

Scenario Prototypes to Test the Adaptability of Insights on Innovation Across Sectors (part 1)

Scenario Prototypes to Test the Adaptability of Insights on Innovation Across Sectors (part 1)

As a sector, higher education is at the low end of innovation rankings. The challenges we face – demographic, technological, political, and pedagogical – will require sustained innovation at a strategic level. Most recently, Josh Kim recommended that higher education look outward for insights on strategic innovation: “Higher education will not figure out its future by only thinking about higher education. We need to look outside academia, and where possible, use these examples to think about our possible higher ed futures.”

To address these challenges by ‘disrupting ourselves’ in higher education, experts in teaching and learning have suggested that lessons learned in the corporate sector could be adapted to the context of higher education teaching and learning. Recent research with Fortune 100 companies in the U.S. has identified exemplars in strategic innovation amongst mature organizations who have institutionalized strategic innovation Beyond the Champion. As noted in our previous WINCan posts about this project, we are exploring whether – and how – we might adapt insights from this corporate sector research to improve and sustain strategic innovation in higher education teaching and learning.

The Business Case for Work-Integrated Learning in Workplace Innovation

The Business Case for Work-Integrated Learning in Workplace Innovation

We have reached an important milestone in our WINCan “Wildly Important Goal” for higher education programs – ensuring that Every Graduate Can Be an Innovation-Enabler in the workplace (and in their other roles as community members and global citizens). Ta-da: the first offering of our foundation course unit on Understanding Workplace Innovation: Concepts and Cases concludes this week, thanks to our wonderful partners at Monash Arts in Melbourne.

For those of you familiar with startup jargon, this was our Minimum Viable Product project test with real students (and followed our Proof-of-Concept studies in B.C. and prototyping work with workplace partners in Ontario). Our next few blog posts will highlight what we – and our students – have learned from this experience and where we’ll be taking this endeavour next.

An Innovation On-Ramp in an Arts Faculty with Interdisciplinary Learning

An Innovation On-Ramp in an Arts Faculty with Interdisciplinary Learning

A wonderful pilot group of keen students has been working with us this term to create an initial course unit providing both a conceptual overview and practical experience with Workplace Innovation. That initial unit, ATS2211 Understanding Workplace Innovation, is a prerequisite for the follow-up work-integrated learning course unit with a workplace innovation project team.

… In this post, we’ll describe two initial elements of the course unit design which demonstrate how project work in the course unit addresses the key goal of our workplace partners: Every Employee Can Engage with Innovation in the Workplace. Those initial tasks are in Job Crafting and Innovation Adaptation. In our next post, we’ll describe additional elements of the learning design which provide experience as representative users in Design Thinking projects.

Mobilizing Research at the Intersection of Innovation and Human Resource Management

Mobilizing Research at the Intersection of Innovation and Human Resource Management

For many organizations, employee-led innovation has become a key element in responding to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. In preparation for our life “beyond lockdown”, an initiative led by Workplace Innovation Europe is supporting workplaces who want to build on this momentum for employee-driven innovation, as a key organizational strategy for thriving post-COVID. In European research, Employee-Led Workplace Innovation has been shown to improve organizational performance and quality of work for employees, with a strong evidence base emerging on how to achieve these complementary goals …

Proposed new university in Ontario highlights Workplace Innovation in its Academic Strategy “Green Paper”

Proposed new university in Ontario highlights Workplace Innovation in its Academic Strategy “Green Paper”

The Ministry of Colleges and Universities in Ontario released last week its Policy Framework for a Major Capacity Expansion in the province’s college and university sectors. While we knew this was coming at some point, it is a pleasant surprise to see them get this out the door while expending so much effort on dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. (But the crisis is not ignored in the Policy Framework, which notes that in the short term “Given the current fiscal situation, proponents are encouraged to bring forward proposals that do not require provincial capital or operating funding in the near term” !)

Sustaining Strategic Innovation in Teaching and Learning: What Can Higher Education Learn from Corporate Innovation Leaders?

Sustaining Strategic Innovation in Teaching and Learning: What Can Higher Education Learn from Corporate Innovation Leaders?

We’ve previously outlined our new project to explore how research insights from corporate sector research could be adapted to guide strategic innovation in higher education. In this post, we’ll consider the research evidence from one stream of research from the corporate sector about sustaining strategic innovation through new management structures and talent development approaches. In subsequent posts, we’ll describe our progress with potential prototype studies to explore adapting some of these insights to sustain strategic innovation for teaching and learning in higher education.

In this post, we summarize three of the research insights on sustaining strategic innovation which caught our interest for the higher education teaching and learning context…and why.

Revisiting our definition of Workplace Innovation

Revisiting our definition of Workplace Innovation

We’ve been creating resources for our first course unit in Monash Uni’s Workplace Innovation option, to go live with a pilot cohort in August. That’s led to a new working definition for Workplace Innovation:

Workplace innovation is the social process of mobilizing new ideas to create better work.

Here’s our initial drill-down on the words and phrases, to help students explore what it means for them:

Project Launch for Beyond the Champion – Strategic Innovation in Higher Education

Project Launch for Beyond the Champion – Strategic Innovation in Higher Education

In a January post, we described a proposed project to adapt recent insights from the corporate sector into our higher education context to allow us to systematically sustain strategic innovation in higher education. We’re happy to announce that we have now “officially” launched this project, with an initial case study from Ontario and other institutions in the loop with strong interest expressed in becoming case study institutions and a project schedule from mid-May through December 2020.

This post has a more academic tone than most of our What We’re Learning posts from WINCan projects – complete with footnotes and the traditional academic note about “more research will be needed…” ! That’s because we wrote it as a chapter abstract proposed for a forthcoming volume in the book series Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning.

Three Key Ideas for Integrating Interdisciplinary Ways of Knowing in Workplace Innovation

Three Key Ideas for Integrating Interdisciplinary Ways of Knowing in Workplace Innovation

In this post, Tom and the Melbourne team leaders (Felix, Sarah and Vicki) share some of their key ideas:

  • Students can engage with Workplace Innovation examples and issues in teaching and learning experiences from multiple disciplinary areas of study.

  • Work-Integrated Learning opportunities in Human-Centred Workplace Innovation can support students in integrating their disciplinary ways of knowing into their innovation capability.

Three New WINCan-related Initiatives Brewing in Ontario – part II

Three New WINCan-related Initiatives Brewing in Ontario – part II

Tom and Anahita summarize our other 2020 WINCan initiatives in Ontario:

  • Collaborating with small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to mobilize research on developing Human-Centred Workplace Innovation within their workforces

  • Leading a Green Paper study on new across-the-curriculum learning outcomes in higher education to better prepare graduates for the Future of Work.

Introducing Our New WINCan-related Initiative in Australia

Introducing Our New WINCan-related Initiative in Australia

Monash University – Australia’s largest – is adapting ideas and insights from WINCan’s Canadian work as a strategic initiative within the Faculty of Arts. Their goal is to develop capability for B.A. graduates to contribute distinctive value in current and future workplaces – capabilities that leverage the disciplinary Ways of Knowing from Humanities, Social Sciences and Performing Arts disciplines and also contribute distinctive value in graduates’ other roles as community members and global citizens.

Co-Developing Capability Specification, Curriculum Maps and Learning Activities

Co-Developing Capability Specification, Curriculum Maps and Learning Activities

Many of our WINCan project teams are exploring how we can best collaborate with workplace partners on co-development of Specification, Curriculum and Learning Activities for Capability in Workplace Innovation. One of the deliverables in our 2020-22 work plan is an initial Capability specification, which will no doubt evolve further over time.

In  this post we’ll review some of the starting points we’re using to get going on these academic-workplace  collaborations, on both the Competencies expected – to contribute effectively to innovation in the workplace – and the underlying Capability required to make those contributions (in the workplace and in our graduates' other roles as community members and global citizens).

Reflections on Knowledge Management & Workplace Innovation

Reflections on Knowledge Management & Workplace Innovation

In previous posts, Blake and Allison described the initial concepts in our pilot course on Knowledge Management and Workplace Innovation, some of the issues and insights from course learning activities and the Design Challenge provided by WINCan’s workplace partners at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. In this final post in the series, two workplace learners from the course reflect on their experiences, followed by reflections from Allison and Blake on one aspect of their ‘learning to be surprised’ experience as facilitators.

Adapting Learning Resources across Higher Ed and Workplace

Adapting Learning Resources across Higher Ed and Workplace

In this post Co-Principal Catalyst, Thomas Carey, and President of EJP Communications, Eleanor Pierre, outline the resulting Adaptable Learning Design Model and some of the key elements being tested with our current prototype Learning Resources to develop workplace innovation capability in different contexts.

Needed Now: A Revaluing of HASS Education

Needed Now: A Revaluing of HASS Education

In this post in the Australian daily higher education news update, Senior Lecturer for Queensland University’s Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Dr. Deanne Gannaway urges Australia’s post-secondary educators to reconsider the value of Humanities and Social Science (HASS) Education. Deanne is an Associate Professor in the University of Queensland's Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation and leads their partnership with WINCan.