What is an Innolearning Glocal Ecosystem (IGE)?

It is a learning system to promote talent and innovation inside and between institutions at all levels and involving everyone’s active co-opetitive participation. It is local and global focused in order to promote externalization without loosing the focus on local needs. Let’s see it in detail.

1. What does Innolearning means?

Innolearning focuses learning on innovation. We understand innovation as all creative change applied to an existing product or service, or else all new products and services created to give an effective solution to an unsolved problem.

How can we promote innovation in the learning process?

Learning is itself a creative status. Without the creation of new concepts, there is no learning involved. So, what can we do to promote creativity applied to effective knowledge?

We can apply a co-opetitive learning methodology based on three principles:

• Problem solving: We start from a real problem to be solved and we study the feasibility of possible solutions.
• Scenario approach: We propose a working hypothesis (a new product or service to be launched to the market, for instance) and we study its feasibility.
• Research: We need to know more about a determined subject and we find out what is being done and what conclusions have been reached so far.

The steps to be followed are:

1. Creating work teams.
2. Finding out what we already know about the problem to be solved, the hypothesis to be tested or the research subject to be investigated and what we do ignore about it.
3. Defining what do we want to know?
4. Finding reliable sources of information and using them to obtain valuable information.
5. Processing and classifying the information obtained.
6. Sharing and drawing conclusions.
7. Creating scalable project plans based on conclusions.
8. Deploying the project plans.
9. Giving feedback about the projects.
10. Obtaining new problems to be solved, new research to be done, new hypothesis to be tested.
11. Back to point 1.

All teams share information during the process and compete to each other in order to obtain the best results.

2. Why Glocal?

We understand “Glocal” as a global solution that respects local particularities, so the institutions obtain a homogenization of their learning strategies and a specialization by geographical and cultural needs.

What gets global?

The following subjects are established by the corporate global training department:

• Budget designated to each area.
• Target.
• Concepts/competences to be learned / talent to be developed.
• Results to be obtained by training plans.

What gets local?

The following subjects are established by local training areas:

• Methodologies.
• Concrete contents.
• Time periods.
• Team working styles.

KPIs can be obtained both at global and local levels.

3. What is an ecosystem?

We understand ecosystem as an organic process that predicts and identifies its own needs, searches for the more effective sources to cover that needs inside and outside the system, obtains them and transform them to obtain a result, learning from feedback obtained during the whole process.

Applied to training models, this ecosystem consist on a group of internal and external processes that allows the institution to predict and detect learning needs, in order to maintain and develop the talent of its own staff. But what processes are really needed and are efficiently proven in training?

• LMS: Learning Management System, to be able to manage compliance and formal classroom and online training processes from start to finish. It should have a white label version for outsourced employees, external partners and customers. With different specifications by user profile.
• SMS: Social management system: to allow employees to obtain and share knowledge within the company. All employees can see the other employees’ profiles, send them messages, read and assess their content, propose and participate in others learning activities (problem solving, research, scenarios approaches, etc). It includes real time and deferred communication tools (wall, forum, chat). This is particularly important to promote collaboration between people in different departments and headquarters or countries, as well as to overcome cultural and social barriers.
• Virtual room: to be able to maintain remote e-meetings and webinars with other employees around the globe. For instance, to maintain periodical meetings between Human Resources business partners to detect new shared training needs from technical staff to be covered.
• CMS: Content management system, to allow employees to post, share and manage their own online contents (technical information, commercial proposals, analysis, etc).
• Author’s tool: To be able to create and publish their own learning contents (based on videos, ppt presentations, texts, etc) on the LMS or SMS, acting as experts on the subject.
• E-Library: With sources (links, data bases, etc) and resources to obtain valuable information and documentation inside and outside the company. It would work as a “Wiki”, so anybody can post and edit concepts (with some exceptions, as corporative terms).
• PLE: Personal Learning Environment: Each employee can choose and build a particular learning path, within their needs and deadlines, in which they can include all types of formal and informal available learning content (articles, forum threads, videos, courses, etc). Employees can invite to participate or share their learning paths with any other employee. This is intended to allow people to feel as part of their own development plan.
• App: Learning mobile applications to facilitate instant participation in any learning activity. It is based on gamification processes to engage active participation, giving “points” to promote employees through their professional careers.
• KPIs: Local and global, including top contents, pages, activities and employees by profile in real time. It should give answer to questions like: What is the most requested content by my employees? What is my top learner? What are women interested on learning vs. men in my company? What are they learning in my Chicago’s head quarters compared to what they learn in NY? What tools are young employees using more than veterans? What is the relation between content price and content use? How much time do my employees invest on learning? What are the learning subjects selected by professional position?
  All this feedback will generate new training strategies and improved learning tools.

Of course, it is not necessary to count with all these processes to create a learning ecosystem from the very beginning. Depending on the needs of your company, a scalable plan can be done to implement these tools through several time periods and budgets.

What is an innoLearning Glocal Ecosystem then?

It is a live learning system that allows covering, managing, assessing and reporting predicted and identified local training needs through innovation based methodologies and learning solutions created and shared by working teams and social individuals through a global learning network.

An innoLearning Glocal Ecosystem is intended to lever personal engagement, active participation and compromise with self development and talent, obtaining proactive innovative team working employees that maximize companies’ growth.

InnoLearning Glocal Ecosystem is a concept by Leticia Lafuente López.

Written by Leticia Lafuente López for LearningLovers.org.