Symposium: Innovation, Skills and Training

Abstract

The skills policies of the late 1980s and early 1990s that underlay the national training reform agenda and the unified national higher education system were predicated on the quest for a 'clever country', competing in global markets through high value added exports. In the past decade, the focus of government policy has shifted to the promotion of innovation, based on the creation of intangible intellectual capital in the quest for participation in a 'global know ledge economy'. Innovation is more than novelty or even invention: it involves change that results in improvement in products, processes, methods, systems and working relationships. The focus in this symposium is the role of workers in innovation. Dent, Fenwick and Newitt draw a distinction between the technological development that can be captured in intellectual property (patents, copyright, plant breeders' rights and so on) and the more nebulous, but equally important concept of 'know-how, based on complex, non-linear patterns of development and diffusion. The authors approach the question of how best to encourage worker innovation by drawing together scholarship from the fields of employment law, intellectual property law and equity. Arguing the incompleteness of existing approaches, which they classify as based either on economic or fairness perspectives, they advance a new framework, based on practices central to the relationship between employers and workers. Such practices include inventive activities, improvements to repetitive actions, creative insights, and attitudes or perceptions. Drawing on psychological contract theory to identify non-financial incentives, Dent, Fenwick and Newitt suggest that an important motivator of innovation is the allocation of control over its uses and outcomes. Drawing on his research on the contribution of worker skills to an industry's or a nation's potential for innovation, Fraser provides an empirically based re-examination of the deskilling thesis--a thesis which sees the underlying tendency of capitalist work organisation as a fragmentation of tasks in order to allow the pace of work to be intensified. Without rejecting this thesis as an underlying historical trend, Fraser investigates recent short-term shifts in the aggregate skill content of jobs in order to identify dynamic aspects of skill change. To the familiar skill criteria of job complexity and worker autonomy/ control, he adds a third dimension of change--skill-intensity. This is extent to which a job exercises, challenges and develops the skills of the person doing it. The analysis is applied across the spectrum of jobs at all qualification levels and organised to take account of different levels of control over the pace of work. Two sub-dimensions of skill-intensity--stretch and learning--provide insight into the psychology of workplace innovation. The distinction between radical and incremental innovation is highlighted in the article by Toner. Radical innovation is more focused on science and engineering, takes longer and requires further innovations in the process of take-up. It is likely eventually to generate Schumpeter's 'creative destruction' of existing techniques, skills, products and markets. By contrast, Toner emphasises the importance of investing in the cumulative productivity benefits of incremental innovation, based on small changes introduced by workers or required by consumers. He critiques the policy risks of placing too much emphasis on research, rather than development, in R&D, and emphasises the critical importance of diffusion in the development process. Stressing the importance of skilled production workers, particularly tradespersons and technicians, he argues that it has been a mistake not to include the Vocational Education and Training (VET) system in national innovation policy, programs and advisory structures. Contrasting the German and Anglophone models of skill development, Toner identifies ways in which Australia's recent under-resourcing of the VET system is likely to inhibit innovation. …