Why is it that some business proposals – no matter how well researched with users and business developed – don’t seem to make it through the organizational jungle to become a real product, while others do? How shall we understand the innovative practices that we engage with our ethnographic work - in particular in a large corporation?
Approach, goals and key benefits
This workshop explores how innovation is socially shaped in organizations. Based on our experiences with practices around innovation and collaboration, we start from three propositions about the social shaping of innovation:
- Ideas don't thrive as text (i.e. we need to consider other media)
- Ideas need socialization (ideas are linked to people, we need to be careful about how we support the social innovation context)
- Ideas are local (ideas spring out of a local contingency, we need to take care in how we like them to travel).
Both the facilitators of this workshop have the experience of incorporating user studies and participation into the corporate research divisions of large, engineering heavy corporations, where “innovation” is valued, but incorporating users into the process has not always been well understood. We are currently collaborating on developing conceptions and techniques around an employee innovation program at Pitney Bowes.
We invite participants to share their own experiences by relating stories of how they engaged business colleagues or clients in innovating. We will introduce silent games as a way of 'modeling' collaboration in an organization. Thematically, the workshop follows up on discussions at two previous EPIC Workshops: ‘Transforming Ethnographic Findings into Business Value’ (Mack and Pierce 2006), and ‘Cut it out in Cardboard’ (Buur & Sitorus 2008).
Structure
1. Introductions
Participants introduce themselves.
2. Setting the scene
The facilitators bring forth the issue of ‘social shaping of innovation’ and briefly provide an overview of their own work.
3. Silent games
In the Harbraken tradition of Silent Games, participants will get a chance to explore collaboration issues in innovation, and experiment with different ways of approaching the social shaping of innovation in small teams.
4. Discussion
Based on the games we will discuss how we can characterize ‘social shaping of innovation,’ and how it applies to the participants’ own experiences.
5. Future research agenda
Towards the end, we will discuss how this field may progress through research and experiments; challenges and directions, etc. Possibly, even commitments to engage in experiments and exchange experiences at a later date.
‘The Corporate Design Game’: In a simple silent game four players explore the collaborative challenge of how a corporate design center interacts with three business units to achieve a coherent corporate style.
Target audience
This workshop is primarily intended for participants who have been struggling with some of these issues in their own companies, but should also appeal to consultants who must gain traction as outsiders.
Organizers
Jacob Buur, University of Southern Denmark
As research director of the new SPIRE centre in Sønderborg, Jacob strives to develop a theory of ‘Participatory Innovation’. Before joining the Mads Clausen Institute in 2000 he established and managed the User Centred Design Group of the Danish manufacturer Danfoss for ten years.
Alexandra Mack, Pitney Bowes
Alexandra is a Workplace Anthropologist in the Advanced Concepts and Technology Division of Pitney Bowes. Her work is focused on developing ideas for new products and services based on a deep understanding of work practice. She is currently focused on understanding how to best enable employee networking and collaboration.
