Future work will likely be characterized by the need for workplace innovation and workers' continuous learning. Both can be partially or wholly addressed through work activities and interactions. Responding to changing requirements of occupational practice and workplace practices involves initiating and enacting workrelated innovations. Through these processes, employees' work-related learning will arise concurrently and interdependently. As workers initiate and enact innovations, the legacies include their learning through them. Even when innovations are initiating by others, the implementation process realizes learning through adapting them to workplace needs. Hence, these co-occurrences and interdependencies are central to both learning and processes through which occupational, workplace and work practice changes are enacted, remade and transformed. Understanding further how employee-driven innovations coalesce is, therefore, central to advancing understandings and practices for future work and working age adults to remain employable and innovative in future work. Drawing on findings from an investigation of how innovations in small to medium size Singaporean enterprises are initiated and enacted, the scope and legacies of different kinds of innovations and their developmental potential comprising workplace activities and interactions are delineated. Three kinds of innovations (i.e., Strategic, Workplace practices, and Procedural) have been identified that shape employees' potential zones of development. Each has specific characteristics associated with their initiation, authorization, enactment and adoption, and learning potential. These three zones of potential employee-development are advanced as a means of elaborating: (i) the interdependence of innovations and employees' learning, (ii) processes through which innovations and learning co-occur, and (iii) how such processes can be supported in workplaces through workplace practices, on the one hand, and the practices and engagement of employees, on the other. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023. All rights reserved.
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