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1. Weaving Social Innovation Communities During Times of Disruption

   Goldstein, Bruce Evan ( March 2021 , Social innovations journal)

   In a time of disruption, how do our social innovation organizations maintain the enabling conditions for productivity, commitment, creativity, and purpose? In this article I summarize the practical wisdom shared with me during twelve online dialogues convened from 2018 to 2020. Highly experienced and effective network designers and facilitators (“netweavers”) discussed how they addressed challenges to their efforts to pursue social justice and ecological and economic well-being while working remotely within collaborative learning networks. I provide their own verbatim advice on how to catalyze creativity and impact within a highly dispersed innovation community, and offer 27 actionable steps organized undermore »four headings that address: (1) how to show up in your organization, (2) how to organize so governance and creativity becomes self-generating, (3) how to manage your organization over time, and (4) how to manage during shock and stress. These ideas can help sustain the ability of your organization to pursue effective strategies to address seemingly intractable problems, adapt to changing conditions and new contexts, scale innovation, and respond rapidly to crisis.« less
2. Jumpstart Virtuous Cycles Within Social Innovation Communities

   Goldstein, Bruce Evan ( March 2021 , Social innovations journal)

   Strong leadership is crucial to fostering social innovation, and yet successful social innovation organizations are often those in which leaders do not play a dominant role. This is made possible by leadership practices that activate a community’s self-organizing and self-guiding potential. In this paper I share some of these effective practices, which were identified by highly experienced designers and facilitators of learning networks during a dialogue series on how to maintain lively, generative innovation communities held from 2018 to 2020. I provide advice from the netweavers in their own words, along with my commentary on how to create this potentialmore »by initiating and maintaining virtuous cycles of exchange and reciprocity, where group members could “pay it forward” without directly expecting something back every time. Many of these leadership practices are simple actions that are common sense practices in our personal lives but often absent in the workplace, such as creating a welcoming environment, assessing what people wanted to give and receive, being the first to give your members something valuable, calling attention to their successes, and underscoring the value that you provide them every time you interact. One powerful way to foster reciprocity that they emphasized was to organize semi-autonomous small-team activities, or co-work. While co-work can and should accomplish useful outcomes, its greatest value may be in how it maintains necessary coherence and coordination while contributing to building ownership and autonomy that supports an organization’s capacity for self-governance.« less
3. Unpacking Latent Diversity

   Godwin, A. ( June 2017 , American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition)

   https://peer.asee.org/29062 This theory paper explores how diversity apart from social identities like race and gender is framed in the engineering education literature and how these concepts promote a different but compatible approach to understanding diversity—latent diversity. Latent diversity is a new approach to diversity work that captures underlying affective and cognitive differences that provide potential sources for innovation but are not visible. This approach does not examine other non-visible social identities like sexual orientation, first-generation status, socioeconomic status, etc. Prior literature suggests that diversity in approaches, problem solving, and ways of thinking improve innovation in engineering design more reliably thanmore »does diversity along the lines of age, race, gender, etc. However, the process of enculturating students into engineering through engineering curriculum often creates homogeneity in students’ approaches to problems, ways of thinking, and attitudes. In this paper, I explore a limited set of existing research on diversity from these underlying perspectives including identities, alternative ways of thinking and being, motivation, cognitive diversity, and innovation and creativity. This work synthesizes the findings of these studies to paint a rich picture of how students develop different attitudes and skills to navigate their paths within engineering. Additionally, this work provides an evidence-based argument for the importance of recognizing and understanding latent diversity to promote a more inclusive environment in engineering and recruit, educate, retain, and graduate more innovative and diverse engineers. This paper opens the conversation about a new, but complementary, focus for developing a STEM workforce rich in talent and capable of adapting to the changing STEM landscape.« less
4. Consider the Human Work Experience When Integrating Robotics in the Workplace

   https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI.2019.8673139  

   Welfare, Katherine S. ; Hallowell, Matthew R. ; Shah, Julie A. ; Riek, Laurel D. ( January 2019 , 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI))

   Worldwide, manufacturers are reimagining the future of their workforce and its connection to technology. Rather than replacing humans, Industry 5.0 explores how humans and robots can best complement one another's unique strengths. However, realizing this vision requires an in-depth understanding of how workers view the positive and negative attributes of their jobs, and the place of robots within it. In this paper, we explore the relationship between work attributes and automation goals by engaging in field research at a manufacturing plant. We conducted 50 face-to-face interviews with assembly-line workers (n=50), which we analyzed using discourse analysis and social constructivist methods.more »We found that the work attributes deemed most positive by participants include social interaction, movement and exercise, (human) autonomy, problem solving, task variety, and building with their hands. The main negative work attributes included health and safety issues, feeling rushed, and repetitive work. We identified several ways robots could help reduce negative work attributes and enhance positive ones, such as reducing work interruptions and cultivating physical and psychological well-being. Based on our findings, we created a set of integration considerations for organizations planning to deploy robotics technology, and discuss how the manufacturing and HRI communities can explore these ideas in the future.« less
5. Early-career Engineers at the Workplace: Meaningful Highs, Lows, and Innovative Work Efforts.

   Klenk, M. ; Bjorklund, T. ; Gilmartin, S. ; Sheppard, S. ( January 2018 , Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference, June 24-27, 2018. Salt Lake City, Utah.)

   Beyond engineering skills, today’s graduates are expected to have a number of professional skills by the time they enter the working world. Increasingly, innovation is one of the arenas where professional engineers should be adept at operating. However, in order to educate our students for contributing to innovation activities in their organizations, we need a better understanding of the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are relevant for early-career engineers in their development efforts. As a starting point to add to this understanding, we start by asking: what does meaningful engineering work look like in the eyes of early career engineers?more »We then go on to consider engineering work that is not only meaningful but also innovative, asking: What does innovative work look like in the eyes of early career engineers? Finally, we consider: How do innovative work and engineering work more generally compare? Based on qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews, this paper analyzes the work experiences of 13 young engineers in their first years of work after graduating from universities in the United States. Interviewee-reported critical incidents of top and bottom moments, as well as experiences in creating, advancing and implementing new ideas in work, were coded into different dimensions of learning experiences according to Mezirow’s [1] transformative learning theory in order to understand better what these experiences comprise. Many positively experienced innovation efforts were related to implementing new features or components to products or process improvements, and collaboration and feedback played an important role in these efforts. Negatively experienced innovation efforts, in contrast, were related to a lack in implementation, solutions and resources. Top and bottom moments were strongly tied to the social dimension of work: top moments were typically related to camaraderie with peers or recognition coming from managers, and bottom experiences with an absence of social connections in addition to falling short of one’s own expectations. The results suggest that managers should be cognizant of the importance of social connections and feedback cycles with their young engineers who are looking for guidance and validation of their efforts. For educators, the results highlight the importance of equipping our graduates with skills suited to navigate this active, social landscape of engineering practice. There are more challenges to tackle in today’s educational settings to prepare students for the collaboration, people-coordination, presentation, and community-building skills they will need in their professional lives.« less