Innovation and Business 29th October 2009

Today was the last of our workshops and it focused on Innovation and Business.
We started with a warm up activity: 5 minute Lift conversation. You have 5 minutes to describe your business or latest innovation. Definitely a skill to develop and we all need to focus about being articulate: being able to do this in a minimum of time.



We were fortunate that Grant Casey from Centre for Learning and Innovation provided some useful ideas about Innovation and ways to identify and foster this in our day to day operations.

Grant started with the following video:




The definition put forward was What is Innovation?
The usual definition relates to “something new”. However, true innovation needs to be a lot more than simply a new idea. True innovation needs to have 3 key components:

1. innovation involves a creative process
2. it results in something distinctive
3. it yields a measurable impact.

Source: Chen and Kai-ling Ho page 2

Think of a common activity in workshops where new ideas are brainstormed. Often that is the end of the exercise. Innovation can only effectively happen when something happens to these ideas. Innovative organisations have “formal processes to generate and nurture innovation from idea to realisation” (Martin, 2006).

How long does it take from the moment the idea is generated to its being adopted? “Do all those ideas have a process to follow, or do they go right down the drain?” (Phillips, 2006)

A Case Study
Cathy Moore in the podcast interview described her ideas on learning design which truly engages students. Cathy’s key message is that effective learning design focuses on behaviours i.e. what the student needs to do rather than what they need to know. True learning occurs when behaviour is changed rather than by regurgitating content.
Futurelab
The report from Futurelab “Overcoming the barriers educational innovation” is an excellent piece on describing innovation, outlining the steps for successful innovation and giving strategies for overcoming the barriers. The executive summary of this report is copied in this appendix to this handout. They tell us that “if the idea is new to an individual, it is an innovation” (p10).

There are 2 types of barriers to successful innovation :

1. barriers due to the work environment e.g. access to resources, time constraints, lack of training and technical problems
2. barriers related to individuals such as confidence, willingness, motivation or no sense of why change is needed (p13).

Much of the current innovation we are experiencing in TAFE relates to technology. Futurelab tells us that “teachers tend to adopt a new technology when that technology helps them to do what they are currently doing better” (p14).

Of particular importance was the following example:

We talked about examples currently in the Faculty. A range of ideas and strategies were discussed. This included:

• Developing an Industry Reference Group
• Promotional materials and ways they could be effectively used
• Growing the Business: ways to increase non-core funding.

We finished with a current Example: Productivity Placement Program. A Quick Reference Guide had been developed and we discussed what is needed. Talked at length about the value of having access to to the explicit knowledge but how do we diffuse the information. Grant provide some very useful ideas about how we focus too much on knowledge which is passive. We need to move to the active- it is about the behaviour in the real world. Should be relate more to simulations and scenarios. certainly something for us to think about when we determine the diffusion of information.