The Co-Occurrence of Work, Learning, and Innovation: Advancing Workers' Learning and Work Practices

Abstract

Aligning workplace innovations and workers’ learning is essential for both effective and adaptive workplaces and workers’ occupational development. Importantly, those innovations and that development can co-occur. Yet, this co-occurrence needs to be understood and embraced to enhance achieving these dual outcomes. Across human history, much, if not most, work-related innovations have arisen through work activities and by workers’ actions. This has been described as the centuries-long tradition of innovation by workers that remains relevant today and across a diverse range of occupations. Only recently have innovations become associated with labs and development units. Until then, and still today, most occupational and workplace innovations are likely the product of workers’ innovation and learning. Far from all workplace innovations are necessarily de novo (i.e., novel) or technology initiated. Many are about adapting what is already known to emerging needs and workplace requirements, including accounting for workplace-specific factors. De novo innovations need adapting to specific work situations, emphasizing the situated nature of innovation, rather than them just being imported and unproblematically implemented. The prospects for workers’ employability and workplace viability are, therefore, richly intertwined. Proposed here is that, ultimately, it is localized processes of worker engagement and workplace support that initiate, secure, and sustain both learning and innovations.