Download The *Quiet Crisis* * productivity, wages, job quality and skills utilisation

More than just science and KT?
Alternative models of innovation
and what HE might contribute to
them.
Ewart Keep
SKOPE, Oxford University
2 models of innovation:
1. Traditional science-led model, where
innovation = R&D, scientific research,
universities and specialist research institutes,
patents, intellectual capital, knowledge
transfer, technology adoption, etc. The
driving force is HE and public investment
therein
2. A broader model that encompasses 1, but
also contains other elements.
Drawbacks to Model 1
• Works well for hi-tech sectors, but fails to engage
with large parts of the mass market, especially
medium and low-tech manufacturing, and the
service sector.
• Relies on the skills of only a small scientific elite –
research scientists, knowledge transfer experts,
senior managers. The rest of the workforce are
simply grateful recipients of advances made by
others.
Lord Heseltine – No Stone Unturned:
“It is tempting to focus on a few, select, top-end sectors
and on high growth companies. The fashion changes, but
at the moment it is high tech and exports to new markets
that are paraded as the easy solutions. They are
important, but ultimately they are not enough to ensure a
broad-based competitive economy. We cannot ignore the
performance and growth potential of the mass of
business across all sectors, including construction,
logistics, retail, hospitality and health and social care…..”
Productivity improvement across the
whole economy is desperately needed:
“In the medium-term, productivity growth –
doing more with less – is the key determinant of
income growth. Our shared prosperity depends
on it”
Mark Carney, Governor, Bank of England. 2015.
Innovation Model 2
Takes as its starting point acknowledgement that
there are two modes of innovation:
1. STI – science, technology and innovation
mode (recognised by English policy)
2. DUI – innovation through doing, using and
interacting (ignored by policy).
Balancing science and other issues:
The concept of innovation and policy activities is not
limited to industrial, scientific and technical innovations;
the innovations can also be social or organisational. If new
technologies are to be adopted successfully, changes
will also be required in working, organisational and
management systems. Because the various organisational
components (technology, strategy, organisation,
management) need to be mutually supportive, a
balanced emphasis on technological and social
innovations is required.
(Ramstad, 2009b: 2)
Advantages:
• Addresses a much wider range of firms
• Involves a much wider range of staff
• Reflects the way that the bulk of innovation
actually happens – most innovation is
incremental process or product innovation,
rather than a novel scientific breakthrough.
Bottom up innovation:
Research shows that a great deal of innovation
within organisations in all sectors (public and
private) occurs at or very close to the productive
process itself. It is concerned with ‘shop floor’ or
front-line staff being able (i.e. empowered and
sufficiently skilled) and willing to make incremental
adjustments in the quality, specification, design
and/or utility of the good or service that is being
delivered, or within the productive process through
which the good or service is delivered, in order to
improve productivity or quality.
Model 2 underpins:
The Nordic economies’ success in making high-waged but
medium and low-tech) sectors operate at advanced levels of
quality, innovation and productivity (for example, forestry,
agricultural machinery, fish farming, fertiliser and fish food
manufacturing, specialist ship building, furniture design and so
on.
As Lundvall et al, (2002) observe:
One of the interesting aspects of the Danish system is that its relative wealth
has been built in spite of a specialisation in low technology
sectors….Supporting innovation in low technology areas will remain an
important priority for industrial policy. In the light of the ‘new economy’
discourse there might be a risk to forget about the renewal of competence in
traditional sectors, including service sectors.
Policy initiatives:
The Nordic countries have developed a substantial,
publicly-supported infrastructure to provide organisations
with the expert help needed to reconfigure work
organisation, job design and production processes and
technologies to enhance their capacity to engage in
workplace innovation . A prime example would be the
Finland’s Tekes programme, but there are many others.
In some instances, HEIs and other educational institutions
have been encouraged and supported to develop the
capacity to provide expert help and advice to firms to
support organisational and workplace re-design via
publicly-subsidised consultancy services.
Broader context:
This broader model of innovation does not take place in a
vacuum. It exists within a labour and product market
environment where routes to low cost, low skill, low
wage competition have largely been closed off by the
presence of strong trade unions, high wages and
associated social provision costs, and economic and
cultural expectations that mean that most firms have
little option but to take the high road to competitive
advantage. Given the general need to compete as much
on quality and product/service specification as on price,
there is a strong incentive for firms to deploy workers’
skills to maximum productive effect, and to pursue
innovation as a means of survival.
The way we configure work is suboptimal if we want Mode 2 to flourish
• Many workplaces continue to design work in
ways that stresses routine and repetitive
processes.
• This makes poor use of employees’ skills.
• Bottom up workplace innovation is weak
Some findings from a Microsoft
survey of UK office workers
• The average office worker will spend across a working
lifetime 90,000 hours at work.
• Process driven tasks dominate many workers’ lives.
71% thought ‘a productive day in the office’ meant
clearing their e-mails.
• 51% of 18-25 year olds believe that attending internal
meetings signifies ‘productivity’.
• When asked, ‘when was the last time you felt you
made a major contribution to your organisation?’, 23%
responded that they believed they had never managed
this. Only 8% thought they had made a major
contribution in the last year.
And……..
• 54% of office workers admitted to working at
the weekends.
• This amounted to about 2 billion hours a year
of unpaid overtime.
• Only 1 in 7 felt inspired by their job. 22%
agreed that ‘I typically am not excited by my
work – it is just something that I do’.
Innovation absent
• 45% said they had less than 30 minutes a day to
think without distractions
• 41% did not feel empowered to think differently
• 42% did not think they had the opportunity to
make a difference at work
• 38% said, ‘the business is very process-driven and
spends little time on doing things differently or
being innovative’.
SOURCE: Microsoft, 2013 The Daily Grind
How work is structured really matters
We know that certain configurations of work
organisation, job design and people
management practices support and embed:
1. Better on-the-job learning (expansive
learning environments)
2. Better skills utilisation
3. More workplace innovation
4. Potentially higher levels of productivity
Workplaces that allow discretionary
learning are required, but…
Discretionary learning workplaces:
Portugal
26% of employees covered
Spain
20%
UK
35%
Netherlands
64%
Denmark
60%
Sweden
53%
Finland
48%
Germany
44.%
SOURCE: OECD, 2010
Instead the UK has a lot of ‘lean’
workplaces
These ‘lean production workplaces’ have lower
opportunities for learning and innovation
UK
40.6% of employees
Netherlands
17%
Denmark
22%
Sweden
18.5%
Germany
19.6%
Employee-driven innovation
“employee learning in the workplace – in terms of
new knowledge, expertise and problem solving skills
– constitutes the raw material for employee-driven
innovation. Basically, employee initiatives and
autonomy, on the one side, and the structure and
conditions of work, on the other side, are important
for innovation….innovation….is not conceptualised
as separate units, but as embedded in daily work
activities and job enactment and social processes in
the organisation”
Hoyrup, 2012.
Attributes of a ‘learning workplace’,
where innovation is possible:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Confidence and trust in managers and colleagues
Mutual learning and support
Giving and receiving feedback without blame
Learning from experience, positive or negative
Learning from colleagues, clients and visitors
Locating and using knowledge from outside sources
Attention to the emotional dimension of work
Discussing and reviewing learning opportunities
Reviewing work processes and opportunities for quality
improvement
And……..
• Management that sees beyond a competitive
strategy based on the delivery of standardised,
low specification goods or services, and that
wants to pursue incremental product, service and
process innovation.
• A management that believes that workers at all
levels in the organisation can contribute to this
agenda, and which organises work and
management systems in ways that facilitate this
objective.
The Scottish government’s skills
utilisation policies recognise this:
“Making more effective use of skills is of
fundamental importance in leading Scotland
back to a higher level of productivity and
sustainable growth. This encompasses many
elements including how well learning is
transferred to the workplace setting, job
design, organisational ambition and
workplace organisation”.
Scottish Government, 2010
Piloting a broader model of
innovation through HE and FE
• SFC skills utilisation projects.
• Family of 12 projects, all different, some run
by HE, some by colleges, some by a
consortium (building on existing
college/university ‘articulation’ links).
• Overall budget, from 2009, over 3 years £2.9
million (front-loaded).
Range of approaches adopted:
• Some of the projects are essentially about
trying to ensure that the outcomes of learning
match needs inside the workplace more
closely. They address a relatively traditional
‘employability’ agenda.
• Most attempt to facilitate a change inside
employers’ workplaces around process and
product/service innovation, work organisation
and job design – a radical development.
Varying degrees of intervention in the
workplace
1. Matching learning to existing jobs and
future-proofing (development & progression)
2. Making workforce learning and capabilities
visible to managers (skills audit)
3. Modifying work allocation, work organisation
and job design to make fuller use of skills,
and/or developing/improving goods and
services.
4. Organisational development and innovation
Examples:
• Glasgow School of Art – using creativity
techniques to help vertical slices of the
organisation re-think processes and products
• Open University working with care home
managers to re-design the supervisory role.
The College or University role:
1. Auditor (what are the skills of the workforce and how
are they being used?)
2. Challenge function (is existing practice as good as it
could be?)
3. Catalyst for reflection and change
4. Co-designer/re-designer of workplace and work
“I try to open up a subtle dialogue but in a nonthreatening way…I will say to them do you want to
manage this organisation where you are holding the
reins all the time. That opens up all sorts of stuff
around power, responsibility, delegation”
Tutor OU social care project
Lessons:
1. Demands a lot from college/HEI staff
2. Needs to be flexible and start with the needs
of the businesses that are being worked with
3. Requires building up relationships and trust
with employers, and using their language.
4. Need to be able to offer benefits to firms up
front
5. Time consuming and labour intensive
6. Dependent on interests and ambitions of
colleges and HEIs
What happens next?
• In England, almost certainly nothing. BIS’s
Innovation policy will remain wholly sciencecentric. Broadening it is regarded as some
form of zero-sum game, whereby new forms
of innovation activity detract from the
importance of science.
• In Scotland……who knows?