Leveraging a Diverse Collaboration in Tertiary Education to Develop Capability for Workplace Innovation

Abstract

Recent developments in tertiary education are demonstrating teaching and learning methods to develop students’ capability for employee-led Workplace Innovation. In this article, we describe an international collaboration to develop shared learning resources and activities in workplace innovation for adaptation in diverse tertiary education contexts. We are intentionally seeking out additional collaborating institutions that differ in mission, size, location and student demographics, to leverage our team’s diversity and encourage innovation.
 When shared learning resources and activities are to be used in a diverse contexts, some core principles underlying instructional success must also be shared in order to ensure adaptations do not remove key properties. We outline four instructional principles underlying the learning design and illustrate how these principles are applied in our current learning resources. 
 We then describe some of the ways that these shared resources have been adapted for different tertiary education environments. We also discuss some of the benefits emerging from the collaboration, including how the inclusion of new resources targeting specific work domains and the transfer of new teaching and learning ideas across contexts.
 We conclude by describing some of the ways we are also collaborating with workplace partners, to ensure that our graduates have the capabilities needed to contribute to workplace innovation practice and to help advance the workplace innovation capability of their own employees.

Sustaining Innovation Capabilities Beyond COVID

“…In contrast, in North America, there has been little government understanding of the importance of employee-led workplace innovation. There have, however, been initial efforts to incorporate workplace innovation capability into post-secondary curricula in the U.S. (Selznick, 2018) and Canada (Baregheh et al, 2021), and to foster collaborations across industry and academic sectors to develop capability specifications (Carey, Maxwell & Melnick 2018) and adaptable learning resources (Carey & Pierre, 2019).…”