Organisational innovation

Adela McMurray, Peter O'Neill, John Buckeridge and Julie Wolfram-Cox identify challenges and blockages to skills acquisition in the technical professions.

Designing open-ended problems to challenge preservice teachers' views on mathematics and pedagogy

This study examines preservice elementary teachers' reported experiences of posing open-ended mathematics problems. Responses of 33 students in a mathematics teacher education course were analysed for the strategies participants used, what they learned and the challenges encountered from an opportunity to collect digital images and pose open-ended problems related to those images. Results indicate that preservice teachers reported a shift in the ways they viewed mathematics and how it might be taught. The school curriculum both constrained and provided possibilities for preservice teachers in noticing mathematics beyond the textbook and mathematics classroom. This study adds to our understanding of teaching as a learning practice and the art of posing mathematical problems as a significant aspect of that practice.

Group composition : influences of optimism and lack thereof

Lesson video and video-stimulated post-lesson interviews were used to study the role of optimism in collaborative problem solving in a Grade 5/6 classroom for the purpose of informing group composition. This study focuses on the activity of two students who differed on the personal characteristic 'optimistic orientation'. It examines how the presence or absence of an optimistic orientation to failures (Seligman, 1995) contributed to these students' interactions with their groups and opportunities for collaborative creation of new knowledge. One group collaborated to develop mathematical knowledge that was new to each group member and the other group did not. These findings raise questions about how to group students who are not yet optimistic to enable collaborative activity, and how to build optimism.

The interface between intrapreneurship, innovation and IT governance

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to examine the links, as reported in the international literature, between intrapreneurship, innovativeness and IT governance within medium to large organizations. A cross disciplinary literature review was conducted and yielded a theoretical framework for identifying and understanding the critical elements underpinning and driving innovation and intrapreneurship performance and their relationship with key aspects of IT governance within organizations.

The role of organisational climate factors in facilitating workplace innovation

A firm’s ability to be adaptable, entrepreneurial and innovative may assist them to maintain, or achieve competitive advantage. We investigated the relationship between organisational climate and innovation in a consulting firm. Analyses of the 98 returned surveys showed significant relationships between organisational climate subscales of autonomy, worker cohesion and innovation with workplace innovation. Co-worker cohesion and pressure (negatively) predicted organisational innovation. Autonomy, innovation, cohesion and recognition predicted innovation climate. Autonomy and innovation predicted individual innovation while cohesion predicted team innovation. The results of the linear regressions revealed that organisational innovation, was the most significant model emerging, accounting for 40% of the variance. The study concluded that organisational strategies encouraging autonomy and co-worker cohesion were conducive to workplace innovation.