Making Employee-Driven Innovation Achievable: Approaches and Practices for Workplace Learning

This volume guides workplace trainers in teaching the significance of Employee-Driven Innovation (EDI) and recognising that each and every employee is capable of being the driver of innovation. Given that innovation has become imperative to unlock competitive advantage, and that employees are increasingly regarded as a quintessential aspect of innovation, this focus on EDI and how to enable it is both necessary and opportune.

The book is split into three parts: first focusing on helping trainers to address the challenges of getting employees to engage in innovative work besides their regular job tasks. How can organisations instil this mindset in their employees who see themselves as stalwarts of status quo? The book then turns to how organisations can engage employees in innovation, with an accompanying emphasis that the enactment of EDI may not follow a prescribed or planned flow. It then closes by offering real-world examples of the unfolding of EDI in both the Finnish and Singaporean contexts.

The book is aimed at educating enterprises, both employers and workplace trainers, and adult educators in the practices and approaches to engage employees in innovation. It seeks to bridge, specifically the theory-practice nexus of EDI, and nudge the enterprises and TAE (training and adult education) practitioners that have yet to involve or engage employees systematically in innovation to seriously consider it.

Justina Tan is Director of Learning and Professional Development at the Institute for Adult Learning, Singapore University of Social Sciences. She holds Doctor of Education (EdD) degrees from University College London, Institute of Education and Nanyang Technological University. Justina leads the IAL in helping enterprises deepen workplace learning and engage in employee-driven innovation.

Wing On Lee is the Executive Director of the Institute for Adult Learning and concurrently serves as a professor at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Before that, he was Distinguished Professor and Director of the International and Comparative Education Research Centre and the Central Plains Education Research Centre at Zhengzhou University. He is the Series Editor of Springer Education Innovation Series; the Routledge Critical Issues in Asian Education series; and Routledge Character, Values and Citizenship Education series. He is former President of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (2010–13). In 2022, he was awarded the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame (IACEHOF), Class 2021, in America.