We are delighted to announce that the innovations in teaching and learning developed by our WINCan team and our academic partners in Australia and Canada have been recognized in the 2022 Innovation and Entrepreneurship Teaching Excellence award. The final stage of this international competition was on September 16th, hosted by Neapolis University in Cyprus as part of the European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
A global panel of expert judges evaluated project descriptions submitted from across the world, to select the finalists participating at the conference. That final stage of this year's competition – the 8th annual edition of the event – included a book chapter describing each team's innovations in teaching and learning, presentations to the panel of judges who selected the three "on the podium" winners and then brief concluding presentations by those three teams in the closing session of the conference.
WINCan’s Tom Carey (co-Principal Catalyst for Academic Partnerships and team leader for the competition) and Anahita Baregheh (WINCan Research Director and Associate Professor at Nipissing University) were part of the international team from Australia and Canada, which was awarded second place for their work on Engaging Students with an Adaptable Model for Developing Workplace Innovation Capability. First place went to a multi-national European team and third place was awarded to a team from Asia – both for Entrepreneurship projects.
There were several notable breakthrough aspects in our team's work:
- It was the first time that employee-led Workplace Innovation has appeared in the award competition as the focus for a winning team. Employee-led Workplace Innovation is the social process of mobilizing new ideas to create better work, that improves performance for the organization and the quality of work for employees.
- It was the first time that a Faculty of Arts has been highlighted as a natural home for a program developing Innovation capability. For our Australian academic partners in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University (Melbourne), providing opportunities for students to develop innovation capability is a key element in the Professional Development program within the Monash Arts Strategic Plan for 2020-2025.
- It was the first appearance for a project intentionally designed for Adaptability, Diversity and Scale-up across academic and workplace contexts. Illustrations of these aspects in the team’s presentation included the following:
- Monash Arts’ ongoing expansion plans from 40 students in the 2020 pilot to 180 students in 2021 and 320 students in 2022 (and with a target of 600 students in 2024, which will allow 25% of all Monash B.A. students to engage with workplace innovation over the course of their programs)
- The adaptation of the learning resources and activities to the distinctive context of a Canadian university's School of Business, with the inclusion of new ideas such as the Motivation To Innovate Inventory and case stories specific to a Business professional domain (Accountancy)
- The adaptability of the learning resources and activities for workplace contexts, as demonstrated by the working learners in the Nipissing course who were able to use innovation tasks in their own workplaces to fulfill course requirements.
Further testing of this adaptability to work settings is underway within our latest collaboration with workplace partners across Canada. Two new adaptations at Canadian universities are also now in progress for 2023 delivery.
Both the Canadian and Australian academic offerings at the core of this work drew on WINCan’s past proof-of-concept studies in B.C. and our past collaboration with workplace partners and academic institutions in Ontario. Results described in the winning award submission from the current projects are also reflected in our current pan-Canadian collaboration with workplace partners and Workplace Innovation Europe on Workplace Innovation for Quality of Work. These projects have been supported by B.C. Association of Institutes and Universities, eCampus Ontario, the Ontario Skills Catalyst Fund and the Future Skills Centre (Government of Canada).