Tara Fenwick University of Stirling

Transcription

1 Tara Fenwick University of Stirling

2 Employee-driven innovation "generation and implementation of new ideas, products and processes originating from interaction of employees not assigned to this task Employee-Driven Innovation: A New Approach, edited by Høyrup et al.

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4 What counts as innovation?

5 determined by very particular interests ideas that yield maximum exchange value in networks of production.

6 Innovation The creation or discovery of new solutions, approaches, or ideas Exploitation the integration of new ideas into everyday practice

7 Scaling up? Rolling out? Too much institutionalising?

8 Both innovation and exploitation are important in everyday practice-based learning... balancing ordering and disordering processes But in uncertainty, innovative learning may have greater importance (McGrath)

9 Individual or environment? Individuals entrepreneurial intuition Work design

10 Different processes: intuiting, interpreting, integrating, institutionalising (Crossan et al.) Different rhythms: e.g. episodic, continuous (Weick & Westley) Different magnitudes of change: e.g. adaptive, generative (Ellström)

11 Improvisation is at the heart

12 The problems: context treated as a container materials ignored, dismissed unfolding relations among personal- social-material are invisible we don t attune

13 Why is materiality so important in innovative learning? Materials permit some actions, and prevent others. Materials convey particular knowledges (Invisible) materials can become powerful Materials act back! People become joined with materials hybrid Politics and ethics are inseparably entwined in all acts, all materials, all namings (Introna 2009)

14 Focus on practices sociomaterial assemblages Understand learning as knowing-in-practice

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16 Not diffusion But webs of active relations

17 Drawing Hands, M.C. Escher, 1948

18 innovation as - emergence Dynamic nonlinear interaction among parts attune to each other possibilities always emerging sum exceeds the parts Continual uncertainty Disordering dynamics disturbances needed! constantly in tension with ordering patterns

19 one excites response in another follow new possibilities new unity emerges Attunement environment, persons, action, knowledge emerge together

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21 Nested Systems The Biosphere The Species Society Collectives The Person Bodily Subsystems: Organs and Cells

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23 diversity attunement sustained interaction disturbance many feedback loops bottom up organising Emergence - in a complex adaptive system

24 Women entrepreneurs Your environment changes so fast I think you re just way more perceptive about what s going on. You ve got way more antenna out...you always have a mirror on you continual feedback from clients and results. So I think I really am way more aware of myself and what s going on. I feel way more in tune. I feel way more alive Attunement Crises rattle the cage, they throw you out of comfort boxes and you go, ok, I ve got a whole new set of situations here.

25 Playing around I m always fiddling with the stuff we make, just sort of going out a little further with them I designed this office for lots of light and laughter. It has to be a fun environment, that there s room for people to feel like there s enough space.

26 Tinkering there is no control, ultimately Practice turns around messy, material, smelly, frightening or tedious activities difficult Attuning everything to everything else There are always surprises (Annemarie Mol, 2010)

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28 risk When everyone thought I was nuts I just kept going the more I learned the more confident I became You have to have the confidence to go forward or pretend that you do the confidence comes with the pretending, the doing

29 Innovative learning as work-arounds Work-arounds: Professionals leverage the material and social to solve problems, stretch expertise

30 Recognising diversity Attuning to nested systems Allowing emergence

31 Innovative learning as... Attuning to minor fluctuations, uncanny slips Attuning to emerging ideas, action possibilities Noticing one s own, and others effects on what is emerging Interrupting blackboxes, holding open disturbances & controversies Tinkering - continuing struggles Tolerating uncertainty, risk

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33 Sociomaterial perspectives New focus on materials Practices (and objects) are a gathering of many things Look at the relations among them Look at how they change each other in action Look at how knowing (and identities, environments, objects) are performed in these enactments

34 What goods are taken to be inherent in innovative activity, and the current prevalence of the innovation discourse in work, policy and learning?

35 Whose assessment determines which innovations become amplified and extended, which are rewarded, and which are stifled?

36 What are different forms of innovation? What new vocabularies can analyse and represent innovative activity?

37 How do different organisational stakeholders clients, trade unions, government, global markets, financiers, regulatory agencies, etc affect the processes of employeedriven innovation?

38 To what extent, and in what circumstances, do the employee and the organisation respectively deserve recognition and material benefit from employees innovative activity? What are the terms of exchange and dissemination of innovative property generated by employees?

39 Whose interests are served through this pervasive press for innovation in work? How do opportunities for employee-driven innovation benefit the workers doing the driving?

40 expanding the space of possibilities