16talesofinnovation vol1 issuu by SPITZEN Publish

16 TALES OF INNOVATION – METHODS, REFLECTIONS AND PRACTICE

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author. Cover and interior design: SPITZEN Publish Edited by: Ph.D. Susanne Justesen and Professor Lotte Darsø

ISBN 978-87-93201-06-4 Volume 1 Second Edition 2015 Published by SPITZEN Publish www.spitzen.dk

16 TALES OF INNOVATION – METHODS, REFLECTIONS AND PRACTICE

Anette Uldall

Katrine Schumann

Anneli Bartholdy

Kristina Dienhart

Anne Murphy

Lars Simonsen

Bo Hasseriis

Michael Meyer

Elias Zafirakos

Mikala Holme Samsøe

Helle Winding

Peter Dexters

Henrik Grothe

Peter Højer

Ingelise Schmidt

Susanne Dahl

CONTENT 7

Lotte Darsø FOREWORD

Susanne Justesen INTRODUCTION TO “16 TALES OF INNOVATION”

Anette Uldall , Maersk Oil THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A SHARED INNOVATION LANGUAGE

Kristina Dienhart, The City of Odense “JUST TALKING…”GETTING READY FOR CO-CREATION THROUGH INFORMAL CONVERSATIONS WITH COLLEAGUES

Peter Højer, DR THE INNOVATION JOURNEY IS ONE WE CREATE TOGETHER

Katrine Schumann, Communicate2innovate HELPING LOCAL HEROES TO INNOVATE MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS: A TALE OF FACILITATION

Henrik Grothe, DMRI IMPLEMENTATION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY

Helle Winding, VIA Teko Design & Business THE 5F MODEL: AN ITERATIVE MODEL TO BOOST INNOVATION

Susanne Dahl, Bikuben Foundation WALKING A MILE IN THE SHOES OF A HOMELESS YOUNGSTER. CREATING STRONGER PHILANTHROPY THROUGH USER ENGAGEMENT IN THE PROCESS OF COLLECTIVE IMPACT

Anneli Bartholdy, Maersk Oil HOW TO MATURE IDEAS IN A TECHNICAL ORGANISATION

105

Michael Meyer, Municipality of Rødovre THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A NEW ASSESSMENT FORM

113

Ingelise Schmidt, Maersk Oil A LOOSE HAND ON THE TILLER: INNOVATION LEADERSHIP IN SPECIALIST TEAMS

123

Mikala Holme Samsøe, Henning Larsen Architects

133

Peter Dexters, Danish Prison and Probation Service

STRATEGIC PHYSICAL PLANNING? YES PLEASE, BUT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THE SAME THING?

SOCIAL INNOVATION IN PRISONS: MAKING CROOKS AND COOKS MATTER

143

Lars Simonsen, Maersk Oil (formerly), now DONG Energy TOP-DOWN APPROACHES TO STIMULATION OF CORPORATE INNOVATION (R&D) ACTIVITIES

155

Bo Hasseriis, Danish Broadcasting Corporation CONSTRUCTIVE USE OF ARTEFACTS IN CREATIVE PROCESSES

169

Anne Murphy, Via University College ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP – A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF HOW INNOVATION OPPORTUNITIES CAN BE CREATED IN ORGANISATIONS

179

Elias Zafirakos, BioPeople, University of Copenhagen KNOWLEDGE BROKERING AS A SILO BUSTER

FOREWORD

By Lotte Darsø, Programme Director at LAICS

The world needs authentic, innovative leaders, who can navigate in complexity and make wise decisions. As the program director of the executive master education LAICS, Leadership and Innovation in Complex Systems, I am dedicated to teach people how to do this. However, during the 8 years of teaching on LAICS I have come to realise that it is not a simple matter of teaching, but rather a more complex matter of creating the optimal context for reflecting and learning. Therefore, the participants are invited to engage in a learning journey that does not end, a lifelong journey that does not stop when people receive their LAICS Master degree, but continues for the rest of their life, hopefully. A journey has a destination. In this case that would be a master thesis and a master degree in Leadership and Innovation. But the true value lies in the journey itself, a journey into the universe of innovation with all its theories, models and tools, and a journey through the vast landscape of leadership using artful approaches that help people explore, reflect and learn through theories, processes and practice. An additional value for the participants, perhaps the most important quality of the education, is that they become deeply involved in a community of innovators and searchers, who want to create inspirational approaches and new possibilities for meeting the challenges of their organisations. This publication provides 16 examples of exactly that. A colourful plethora of narratives of how important challenges in organisations can be examined, analysed, understood and solved. This would not have happened without a highly entrepreneurial soul among the LAICS faculty (in fact we have many)! I am grateful to Susanne Justesen, who conceived the idea and carried it through. Thanks to the team, who helped us. And thanks to the LAICS Alumni for their inspiring contributions to this publication. This is the “fruition” of their LAICS education, but reading between the lines I hope you will sense the thoughtfulness, the hard work and the innovative leadership that made it all possible.

Lotte Darsø, Programme Director at LAICS / Foreword

INTRODUCTION TO “16 TALES OF INNOVATION” By Ph.d. Susanne Justesen, LAICS faculty and innovation advisor with Innoversity Copenhagen

This book is about innovation and leadership - as it unfolds in our everyday lives. Each of the 16 tales of innovation in this book describes the methods, the reflections and the practice of a group of ambitious leaders who wanted more than “just” manage their current businesses. The book tells the story of how each leader found his or her own way to experiment with creating a different future - big or small. For their employees. For their organisations, and for themselves. The “16 Tales of Innovation” are written by sixteen leaders, each of whom have experimented with different innovation tools, models and innovation theories within their own company and organisation. They come from 12 different organisations such as Maersk Oil, Henning Larsen Architects, Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR), Bikuben Foundation, Danish Technological Institute, The Municipality of Odense, Copenhagen University etc. And their very different innovation tale will provide you with a glimpse of how each leader applied innovation theories and knowledge onto everyday challenges within their own workplace/practice. All of the 16 leaders have completed the Master in Leadership and Innovation in Complex Systems (LAICS) - a two-year part-time Executive Master which has existed since 2006 as a collaboration between Aarhus University (AU) and Copenhagen Business School (CBS). In this book they share with you their unique insights into the processes, reflections, and impact of their academic work with innovation in practice. When you read the tales, you will read about their professional and personal reflections on, and experience with, innovation. The book provides an interesting peek into the “machine room” of organisational life and none the least the fascinating journey from innovation in theory to innovation in practice. By

Susanne Justesen, LAICS / Introduction to “16 tales of innovation”

reading each tale you will be presented with the various tools, models and processes that were developed and piloted by each of the writers themselves. These particular texts demonstrate how innovation is not merely interesting “on paper”, but may also change and help us rethink and reframe our own identities as leaders and the way we do things, when we want to do them differently. Many innovation books have a tendency to describe primarily one story or one approach to innovation, and are often written by either researchers or consultants. What makes this book so unique is the diversity of the stories. It offers a conglomerate of different theories, methods, approaches as well as organisations - all focusing on different ways in which to work with innovation. The book thereby shows that there are many different ways in which to do innovation, and how to do it well.

THE INNOVATION TALE BEHIND…..

As many other tales of innovation, this book came out of a personal frustration. I have been with LAICS for seven years, initially as a guest lecturer in 2008. Over the years I have grown very fond of the LAICS programme and I have become gradually more involved. I am now the proud leader of module 2 (second semester) which focuses on “The Business of Innovation”. What I especially like about the programme is the complexity of the content, the diversity of the LAICS students and none the least the creative process of supervising mini-projects and master dissertations at LAICS. During my years with LAICS I have supervised many different mini-projects (15 pages handed in each semester) and master dissertations (60 pages); which I thoroughly enjoy - from the initial stages where students identify good problem formulation, to their production of research and academic texts, and none the least to the discussions over the exam table once the mini-project or dissertation has been finalised. It is ALWAYS fascinating to read these different tales of innovation. Firstly, because they are solidly grounded in practice, as it evolves around the real- life challenges of leaders at work; and secondly, because they manage at the same time, to benefit from the nourishing insights from innovation research and theories. It therefore seems to me that these executive master students somehow have managed to navigate the complex relationship between

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

theory and practice, which so many others fail to do because they are either too caught up in theory or too caught up in practice. But back to my personal frustration. As much as I enjoy the process of creation, I equally dislike the process of elimination. As soon as I leave the exam room I am obligated to take the mini-project (or master dissertation) directly to the paper shredder, since most of the texts are labelled as confidential as they contain sensitive information which can not be readily shared, thereby eliminating each and every tale of innovation; and all of the students’ hard work in the shape of methods, reflection and practice. I perfectly understand why our LAICS students choose to keep their projects confidential, but never the less - watching these fascinating tales of innovation, which would be such valuable learning material for others, disappear into the shredder, is just terribly frustrating…. Then, over dinner one evening I vented my frustrations with professional editor Christine Ditlevsen, and together we developed the idea of this book, in a format which made it possible for the leaders who graduated from the LAICS programme, to share their learnings with the rest of the world. I submitted our book proposal to the study board at LAICS and we received a big “GO”. And on we went with the idea, and with this book. All graduates from LAICS were then invited to join us and 16 leaders decided to do so. They all submitted their abstracts in June 2014. All of us went on a writing retreat for a weekend in Liseleje on the northern coast of Denmark in September 2014. A great weekend where we all worked together in producing the 16 articles or chapters of this book. The writers worked together in smaller groups, and Christine and I conducted intense “Doctor Text” consultations with each writer. And everyone - impressively - managed to submit the first draft of their article before leaving Liseleje. Well done! Since then we have all worked together to get each of these innovation tales from Liseleje ready for inclusion in the book you are now reading. It has been a great journey and I have really enjoyed working with each of the “tale-makers” in the book. Just as I have enjoyed working with the team behind the scene, e.g. Lotte Darsø (fellow-editor), Christine Ditlevsen (co-initiator), Rikke Finland

Susanne Justesen, LAICS / Introduction to “16 tales of innovation”

(strategic editorial advisor), Dina Maria Arnesen (interim project leader), our book publisher Kristin SĂ¸rum from SPITZEN Publish; and none the least the wonderful Hilde Bollen, programme coordinator at LAICS. I hope you will enjoy these 16 tales of innovation. Susanne Justesen

16 Tales of Innovation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; methods, reflections and practice

By Anette Uldall, Maersk Oil

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A SHARED INNOVATION LANGUAGE The article discusses relations between geoscientists and management, and how this relationship impacts on innovative output. Uldall explores how not having a shared innovation language may directly impact on the evaluation of how innovative and creative a group of geoscientists are in their daily work at Maersk Oil.

The Author Anette Uldall is Senior Lead Geophysicist at Maersk Oil.

About the article The article discusses relations between geoscientists and management, and how this relationship impacts on innovative output. Uldall explores how not having a shared innovation language may directly impact on the evaluation of how innovative and creative a group of geoscientists are in their daily work at Maersk Oil.

WHEN WE DISCUSS CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION amongst ourselves as employees inside the organisation, we are often very unclear on what we are talking about. And if we have not defined what innovation is, how can we know if we are an innovative organisation? And if we attempt to answer the question anyway, our answer will depend on our implicit understanding of what innovation is. If we understand innovation to be ‘The Bright Idea’ as described by Drucker (2007), it is very likely that our answer is no, because as Drucker (2007) explains, it is the riskiest and least successful source of innovative opportunities. However it is also the most often-described innovation opportunity, because its successful application often produces good narratives.

Drucker’s (2007) Seven Sources for innovative Opportunity: 1. The Unexpected (Unexpected success, failure or outside events) 2. Incongruities (Between reality as it is and how it ought to be) 3. Process Need 4. Industry + Market Structures (Changes that catch everyone unaware) 5. Demographics (Population changes) 6. Changes in Perception (Perception, mood and meaning) 7. The Bright new idea / New Knowledge (Scientific + nonscientific)

Figure 1

If we look further into descriptions of innovation, such as Drucker’s Seven Sources of Innovative Opportunity, Drucker (2007), see Figure 1, the picture becomes much more nuanced and the answer to the above question will most likely be much more positive.

Anette Uldall, Maersk Oil / The significance of a shared innovation language

Likewise, if we discuss creativity, we will be likely to underevaluate how creative we are, because often our understanding of creativity is that it is far away from our daily work, which mainly is in natural science and involves maths and physics. If we try to be more specific in describing how we understand creativity, we can apply a model such as the Art Making Process (Austin, R.D, & Darsø, L., 2006), shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. The Art Making Process. Source: Austin, R. D. & Darsø, L. (2006). In the model the Urge describes a desire to create; Practice and skills describes the daily ongoing routine and discipline that improves the artist’s ability to create art; Scratching is about finding input in order to get several small ideas that can help to inspire the project; whereas The lock and the Rituals represents a threshold to be overcome, caused by fear of failure. The Bubble signifies the creative process where there is a knife-edge balance between structure and chance; and finally, Closure is when the process reaches completion.

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

If we include this model in our discussions about creativity and ask if we can recognise the phases in this model in any of our daily work processes, again it is more likely that we will be more positive in the assessment of our creativity. For this article, interviews were conducted discussing innovation and creativity without applying or discussing any stringent definition of creativity and innovation amongst the interviewer and interviewees. It became apparent that different assumptions of what the words mean are hidden in the words of the interviews. The interviews create a rich basis for investigating how a shortage of a common innovation language impacts on our interpretation of how creative and innovative we are.

DATA GATHERING METHOD

The empirical data were gathered in the form of semi-structured qualitative interviews as described by T. W. Lee (Lee, 1999). The overall themes and a pre-determined sequence of questions discussed were selected following the theory of complex responsive processes developed by Ralph Stacey (Stacey 2007), looking into the system as a whole. Therefore the discussions were focused on the areas: quality of participation, quality of conversations, quality of anxiety and how it is lived with, quality of diversity and finally unpredictability and paradox. The purpose of the interviews was to obtain the intervieweesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; view of the situation in Maersk Oil with respect to creativity and innovation. The lack of agreed definitions of innovation and creativity when the interviews were performed was unintentional, but nonetheless important for the findings of this study. In total eight people were interviewed. All interviewees are trained as geoscientists. When the interviews were conducted, six worked as geoscientists, and two mainly in management. The agreed duration of all interviews was one hour, but most overran to approximately two hours due to the shared interest in the discussions.

INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY DEFINITIONS AND DAILY WORK

The daily work of geoscientists in an oil company is to integrate knowledge of specialisms such as geology, geophysics, petrophysics and reservoir engineering into a common understanding of what the subsurface might look like. Because we are an oil company, in particular the chance of hydrocarbons being present is in

Anette Uldall, Maersk Oil / The significance of a shared innovation language

focus. If hydrocarbons are present we need to predict as reliably as possible how these hydrocarbons might flow if we drill and try to bring these to the surface. The work process described above will generate new knowledge about how the subsurface might be and what the potential is of finding producible hydrocarbons in the area we work with. This work can therefore, following the definitions from Drucker (2007), see Figure 1, be described as an innovation process that gives the oil company an opportunity that is based on knowledge that did not previously exist of how the subsurface might be in an area. When innovation is discussed in the interviews, there is general consensus that we try to be innovative in our daily job, and that we have the company’s support to try to be so, but interestingly the focus in interviews is solely on how we could generate more of, or better handle, what would be ‘Bright Ideas’ in the Drucker (2007) sense. By interpreting the interviews, it can be seen that when we discuss innovation it seems to be implicit in our language that we talk about the next bright idea. We seem to collectively disregard other types of innovation we do as part of our daily jobs when we create new knowledge about the subsurface we work with. These innovations may be generally overlooked. Thus we could conclude that we often describe ourselves as less innovative because we do not get enough of the ‘Bright Ideas’ that in Drucker’s (2007) model would be very unlikely to succeed, while we do not realise that we, according to his model, do innovative work on a daily basis when we generate new knowledge for the company. When creativity is discussed in the interviews there is general consensus that we are creative. There is also agreement that there are many possibilities for being creative in the company, but we may sometimes lack space and time. Again, as mentioned above, we discussed creativity in the interviews without discussing any definition of creativity. Interpreting the interviews in retrospect, there seems to be a common consensus that working creatively means getting and pursuing an idea, or trying to generate a new workflow. When looking into a model of creativity such as the Art Making Process shown in Figure 2, it can be seen that this definition of creativity is much broader. The model highlights issues such as personal practice and skills, urge, preparation and skills, being in the bubble and so on. These issues seem to be absent in the interviews.

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

If the Art Making Process, with its own language, had been applied when discussing creativity in our daily work, it might have been possible to formulate the following observations. We know it is important that we keep practising and improving our skills, we do our scratching by discussing topics of interest with colleagues, going to conferences, participating in field trips and so on. We prepare for working in new geological areas by reading existing literature, and we have an urge though our education to work with our colleagues and create new knowledge on what the subsurface might be like in a new area the company enters into. We overcome our fears of failure by entering into the bubble with capable colleagues we trust. We explore possible outcomes together, and as with artists, we are helped by our organisations by often having firm deadlines that help us reach closure. We can discuss how we work with fear of failure, and how we generate trust. Here, applying Darsø’s Innovation Diamond (Darsø, 2001) might help in understanding how relations helps in best exploring the field between knowledge and ignorance, before we deliver the concepts that form the basis of the subsurface model that defines the closure of our process. When innovation and creativity activities of daily work are described in terms of the Art Making Process and Drucker’s innovation model, it is clear that more creative and innovative work is done than we normally believe. We have just not applied a language that makes this knowledge explicit. It also becomes apparent how we, according to these models, will be able to better discuss how to sustain the creative and innovative processes in our daily work.

FUTURE APPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS

Making our creative and innovative work more explicit though a common innovation language is important because it will make it possible to focus our attention on how we can better sustain our innovative and creative processes in the future. It also has the potential to change the way we understand our work as geoscientists. We do not often think of ourselves as creative and innovative, and may therefore not realise the full potential of working more knowingly with creativity and innovation processes in our daily work.

Anette Uldall, Maersk Oil / The significance of a shared innovation language

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Austin, R. D. & Darsø, L. (2006): ‘A Framework for Examining the Concept of Closure in Innovation Process’, paper for the 3rd Conference of Art and Organisation in Krakow, Poland, September 2006 Darsø, L. (2001): Innovation in the Making, Samfundslitteratur, Denmark Drucker, P. F. (2007): Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Elsevier Lee, T.W. (1999): Using Qualitative methods in Organizational Research, Sage Publications Stacey, R.D., (2007): Strategic Management and Organizational Dynamics, The Challenge of Complexity, Fifth Edition, FT Prentice Hall

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

By Kristina Dienhart, The City of Odense

“JUST TALKING…” GETTING READY FOR CO-CREATION THROUGH INFORMAL CONVERSATIONS WITH COLLEAGUES Dienhart proposes a new way of using the knowledge which lies within this large body of employees, not just the formal knowledge in the job description, but the knowledge people have about everything else that defines them, such as hobbies, neighbourhoods and life situations. The case study is about sharing knowledge in a trustful space, and about creating new relations which support working together across professional silos and organisational boundaries.

The Author Kristina Dienhart is Head of Program in the City of Odense, Department of Culture and Urban Mobility in Denmark.

About the article Dienhart proposes a new way of using the knowledge which lies within this large body of employees, not just the formal knowledge in the job description, but the knowledge people have about everything else that defines them, such as hobbies, neighbourhoods and life situations. The case study is about sharing knowledge in a trustful space, and about creating new relations which support working together across professional silos and organisational boundaries.

City of Odense The City of Odense employs a total of 17,000 employees, divided into five departments. The case material for this research topic was gathered in the Department of Culture and Urban Development, which includes a variety of professionals from city planners to environmental engineers, and from maintenance staff to musicians in the symphony orchestra.

FACING A NEW ROLE FOR PUBLIC EMPLOYEES IN SOCIETY

Across the public sector in Denmark, there is an awareness of the need to change the way we meet the challenges of society today. Bason (2010:6) describes the necessity of building an innovation infrastructure in the public sector, which involves “a shift from running tasks and projects to orchestrating processes of co-creation”. Co-creation as a term has been used a lot over the last fifteen years, with Prahalad and Ramaswamy being among the first management thinkers to describe and define co-creation as a “creation process where new solutions are designed with people, not for them” (Bason, 2010:8). And that is exactly what we in the municipality are to do - create solutions with the citizens, not for them. Innovation and co-creation as concepts seem to find their way into strategies, speeches and PowerPoint presentations everywhere. It seems to be commonly agreed upon within the public sector that we need to involve end-users more - not only when we know the solution to a problem and want to hear their opinion, but also in the initial problem solving stages. So what does it entail for us to feel ready to engage in a process of co-creating solutions together with citizens, stakeholders and other institutions?

BRINGING PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE INTO THE WORKPLACE

This is an invitation to explore a new type of space for knowledge sharing within an organization which prepares the project leader for taking on this new role. This innovative knowledge space challenges the traditional boundaries of what might be considered “professional” and “non-professional” knowledge in a public administration. Before engaging in a co-creation process with citizens and stakeholders, employees meet and share knowledge through informal conversation based on their hobbies, interests or the place they live in order to help a colleague broadening perspectives and understanding of a subject matter. Basically this can be seen as an invitation to come and share personal stories about a subject. The intention is to share your lived experiences related to a certain place, issue or activity - it is all about “just talking”. And that is what we did on two separate occasions in the department of Culture and Urban Mobility in the City of Odense. The first case focused on how to handle waste water in allotment gardens (case description 1), and the second project focused on urban planning for a business district in a suburb, (case description 2).

Kristina Dienhart, The City of Odense / “JUST TALKING…”

In both processes the project leaders got an abundance of information and had the possibility to ask their colleagues whatever questions they might have. They found that they had gained a better understanding of “the real world”, and that the stories and images helped them feel prepared to engage in co-creation processes afterwards.

Case 1: Handling waste water in allotment gardens The purpose of this project was to handle waste water in allotment gardens, where up until the project began, people had handled their waste water in different ways in different gardens and within each lot. The project group had to decide whether they should force the use of sewage piping for every single lot, or maybe instead find different solutions for different types of gardens. The handling of waste water thus quickly became a politically complex issue, which made it feel even more dangerous for the project leader to engage in a process with the owners and their associations. In order to prepare the project leader for the process, and familiarise her with life in allotment gardens, we therefore did the following: •

Invited 8 colleagues, who were also allotment garden owners, to meet with the project leader

•

The project leader had a dialogue with them about what life was like in an allotment garden

•

Each participant had his/her own story to tell - one used his allotment garden for relaxing, another spent all day cultivating fruit and vegetables, and a third colleague had a “prize garden” which he kept meticulously

•

One colleague asked why the municipality had not demanded that they handle their waste water many years ago; he had been saving the money for sewage for years now – quite an unexpected piece of information

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

•

All these stories were extremely helpful to the project leader in preparing for handling the whole process with the allotment gardens

•

The project leader found she had a forum where she could ask questions about subjects where she was anxious about how the owners of the allotment gardens would react. Once she had heard the different views on her questions from her colleagues, and had a chance to talk with them about it in this safe space, she felt ready to engage in a process with the owners and their associations. She went straight back to her office and called the head of the association to invite them to engage in a co-creation process.

INVITING COLLEAGUES FOR A CUP OF COFFEE

There are different elements which make such a simple thing as talking with colleagues in this way very different from our usual approaches in the municipality. In designing the format of the session and the invitations, I was very aware of emphasising the informal setup in terms of language and physical setting. The language was informal and personal, inviting people for coffee and cake and an informal conversation under the headlines: “You know so much! Help out a colleague” for one session and: “Share your knowledge – help out a colleague in Urban Planning!” for the other. Placing the invitation in the canteen, in this most informal space in the organisation, where it is legitimate not to talk about work-related issues, frames the informal nature - in the same way as a notice in the supermarket, inviting you to take action because of personal interest rather than a “forced” or formal meeting set-up. The topic and the reason that people met is rooted in a personal and not a professional sphere of knowledge or interest. People who meet in this way have chosen to be there based on their personal motivation. No one has forced them to join,

Kristina Dienhart, The City of Odense / “JUST TALKING…”

they did so because they thought it would be interesting and they have given it priority in their work schedule. They did not have to prepare anything in advance, there was no formal agenda, and the purpose was not to agree on what might be right or wrong, but rather to share stories and perspectives.

CREATING A SPACE OF TRUST

In many projects or processes which seek to find new and innovative solutions, it is a challenge to work out how to gain, navigate and encounter knowledge in such a way that diverse perspectives are revealed and accepted as part of the process. In the innovative knowledge space created among colleagues, the framework calls for divergence and a multitude of angles on the same question. It is about creating a tableau of images which helps the professional to better understand the area from angles other than the professional one. And it is about creating a sense of trust between the participants, which is much easier among colleagues than among strangers. Lotte Darsø (2001) stresses the importance of trustful relations in order to be able to expose your ignorance and to accept the ignorance of others in a fruitful dialogue. It all comes down to creating a space where you are not afraid of asking “stupid” questions and where everyone’s contribution is relevant. Creating such trustful relations is something which in many project groups or teams can be a long and rugged journey, and which needs much attention and consideration.

Case 2: Urban planning for a business district in a suburb There is a new business district being planned southwest of the city center, and the project leader wanted to meet with citizens and discuss the plans with them. We have a camper which is used for this - inviting people to stop by and talk with the planners about the urban plans for their area. But before doing so, she wanted to see what she might learn by inviting colleagues from that particular area for an informal discussion first. The input from

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

this informal session helped her establish a language and some stories which made her feel more prepared for the conversation with citizens the following week. We facilitated this process in the following way: •

Six colleagues from the area were invited to participate in the informal conversation

•

They all came from different parts of the department - some of them even came from across town to participate in the session.

•

The project leader learned a lot from the many different examples of how people use the stores in town, what they lack in the area, how they move around - car, bike, walking etc.

•

She also learned that a certain area of a small park which she had thought as definitely”off-limits” for future development, could maybe be used in a different way

•

She was provided with names of certain people in the area, who might be relevant to involve more in the upcoming process

•

She also learned where she should actually place the camper, so that most people would see them

•

She received important advice as to how she could best communicate in the area in the upcoming process, where to hang the posters etc.

In both sessions it was clear however that this sense of trust was inherent in the setup. Even though people did not know each other it became very clear that such a trust was experienced by all participants. It was the simple fact that we were all colleagues and that we are all from within the municipality that immediately created this shared sense of mutual trust and a shared feeling of being connected and

Kristina Dienhart, The City of Odense / “JUST TALKING…”

related that made it safe for the project leader as a professional to ask any questions and to say anything. It was a clear condition of the process that it was not about agreeing, but about sharing information and knowledge. The sense of trust and the sense of being able, as the professional, to open up and show ignorance I believe is reinforced by the fact that we are inviting people who can be considered everyday-experts in a very diverse way on the specific topic, to help someone who lacks these knowledge aspects about the topic. The knowledge is not related to the participants’ professional expertise on the subject, and they all join the session out of personal interest. Because the project leader, who invites them, is an expert in a different, more professional, area on the subject, it is not her professional expertise which is challenged but is more an invitation to expand her knowledge. When a project leader becomes aware of the many different stories and metaphors related to the problem to be solved, it might influence the overall framing of the problem and the views on possible solutions might shift. In this sense, the innovative knowledge space may be seen as co-creation in itself - a new first step in a co-creation process. This expanded field of knowledge prepares the project leader to better engage in a co-creation process afterwards with the citizens, where they, as representatives of a public body, are more prepared to show professional empathy and engage with the citizens from their point of view. And this is not easy, especially not when you represent a public body as well as a professional angle, and also have legal frameworks to adhere to.

GETTING INTO ACTION

The concept of this innovative knowledge space among colleagues is now being introduced as a legitimate way of spending your work time in the Department of Culture and Urban Mobility. It is one of several initiatives selected to support a change in organisational culture as part of a large reorganisation in the department. Bringing other parts of your knowledge as an employee into action at work is a whole new way of considering what it is you can spend your workday doing, blurring the lines between “personal” and “professional” spheres. It fundamentally changes how we perceive the concept of work - both why we meet and how we meet.

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

Rethinking what type of meetings may contribute to an effective organisation is part of this. Patricia Shaw (2002) speaks of conversation as key to change and says that often it is not given the same attention as more formal structures in an organisation, but that when it is centered around matters that are important, it can have great impact, because conversation itself is a key process which influences how an organisation is formed and how people interact. It is a very effective way of creating new relations across professional silos and boundaries. When people take part in a conversation because of shared personal interest, relations are created which make distances across the organisation much shorter. It is just so much easier to approach a different department or a different professional field when you know someone - when there is already a relationship. Meeting colleagues across organisational boundaries in this way, and being able to bring value to each other’s work will help poke holes and create bridges between the silos, which stand so stubbornly as barriers to change and co-creation in a large organisation. When such new types of interaction and constellations between people emerge, it may be considered social innovation; social innovation in the way Lotte Darsø (2012) defines it, namely as new ways of organising, new human infrastructures. The innovative knowledge space among colleagues is such a simple idea - use it and see what happens!

Kristina Dienhart, The City of Odense / “JUST TALKING…”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bason, Christian (2010). Leading Public Sector Innovation. Co-creating for a better society. Bristol: The Policy Press. Brown, Juanita and David Isaacs (2005). The World Café. Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. Darsø, Lotte (2001). Innovation in the Making. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Darsø, Lotte (2012). Innovationspædagogik. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Shaw, Patricia (2002). Changing Conversations in Organisations. A complexity Approach to Change. London: Routledge.

Commentary for the figure: An intra-organisational co-creation process as a first step in a larger co-creation process. Colleagues functioning as citizens contributing with their smaller tableau as part of the fuller picture.

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

By Peter Højer, Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR)

THE INNOVATION JOURNEY IS ONE WE CREATE TOGETHER Højer’s article uses Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas to investigate how co-design and employee involvement can be used as a tool to analyse and redesign an organisation. The article also explores how design thinking can support a process where employees share knowledge to achieve a greater common knowledge and understanding of challenges and opportunities.

The Author Peter Højer is Head of Design at the Danish Broadcast Corporation (DR), working within DR Design, an in-house design agency and part of DR Media Production.

About the article Højer’s article uses Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas to investigate how co-design and employee involvement can be used as a tool to analyse and redesign an organisation. The article also explores how design thinking can support a process where employees share knowledge to achieve a greater common knowledge and understanding of challenges and opportunities.

Danish Broadcasting Corporation The Danish Broadcasting Corporation is Denmark’s oldest and largest electronic media enterprise, with approximately 3,000 employees.

I HAVE BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MERGER of six different departments into what today constitutes DR Design as an in-house design agency, with a total of 108 employees (see Figure 1). The merger took place in February 2013, with the purpose of benefitting more from all of the skills, traditions and ways of working that seemed very different between the six departments. However, we were soon to realise that merging the departments was not enough. We had to do more in order to really tap into the synergies we, in management, were sure would be there.

Figure 1: The six departments of DR Design today, which in total consists of 108 employees

The purpose of the innovation journey was to develop a shared business model for the six departments, as a first step in rethinking and redesigning the organisation, e.g.: â&#x20AC;˘

Analyse how we as DR Design can do better in relation to both our customers and our end product.

Peter HĂ¸jer, DR / The innovation journey is one we create together

•

Improve our large interdisciplinary projects, so that we exploit possible synergies between departments.

•

Develop a more effective management structure between and across departments.

In order to do so, we organised six half-day workshops, one with each department over a period of two months in the spring of 2014. The purpose of these workshops was to analyse our existing business model. We used Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas (see Figure 2 below) as a common visual meeting tool, because of the importance of having a shared framework of rules and constraints (Ghais, 2005). Instead of starting with a blank canvas, participants in this way had something to build on, which fosters creativity, both in working with design solutions and when working with organisational processes.

Figure 2: The Osterwalder Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010)

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

I chose to use the Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas first of all because it has a purpose in itself, namely to develop a new organisational design, based on a thorough analysis of the existing business model (Osterwalder et al. 2010). Second, I chose Osterwalder’s model because of its simple structure, which allowed us to visualise and express the whole business model on a single sheet of paper (see Figure 2). I chose to use an external facilitator for the workshops. I did so partly because it gave me the opportunity to be an observer at each workshop, and partly because I do not have experience in facilitating Business Model Canvas workshops.

We arranged to have a large printed version of the Business Canvas Model mounted on the wall, and lots of post-it notes scattered around the room. This was in order to promote interaction and a more informal setting, by ensuring that people moved around the room. Also, by introducing the canvas I allowed for the creation of a shared space, where participants could explore each other’s ideas visually. It was not possible to involve all employees from each department, so instead I chose to involve managers and a few staff members from each of the departments. Participants were selected based on criteria for maximum diversity in each workshop, to ensure that we were able to analyse all aspects of our business, from different perspectives.

Peter Højer, DR / The innovation journey is one we create together

One of the workshops revealed that the service one part of the department offers to our external customers is essentially the same service another part of the department offers to internal customers in DR, prompting one of the participants to say that the two functions in the future should be merged. The first six workshops ended up with us identifying important questions and challenges for each department which need to be addressed in DR Design. For the Props department we identified these five questions: • • • • •

How can we ensure that the opening hours match customer needs? How can we get closer collaboration between external and internal rental? How can we ensure greater coordination between colleagues? How can we ensure that assignments are solved in the best possible way? What might a new pricing structure look like?

Based on these findings, we designed a follow-up workshop in one of the departments (workshops will follow later with the other departments) where we addressed all of these five questions. This follow-up workshop resulted in 32 initiatives, ranging from guidance on how to handle email to new opening hours and the creation of a major task board and a brand new pricing policy. I was very impressed with these results, and look forward to seeing what will result from this second series of workshops.

HOW CAN DESIGN THINKING BE USED AS A LEADERSHIP TOOL FOR CHANGE?

As a trained designer and architect myself, I have a vested interest in design thinking, and with this process I wanted to explore design thinking, understood as a combination of empathy towards the user, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and a thorough analysis in finding solutions (Kelley & Kelley, 2013:19). I therefore wanted to explore how I could draw upon my extensive experience from the world of design, and use that as an approach to facilitate organisational change, and co-design our future way of working within and across the Design Department in DR. This approach to co-design is departing from a definition of co-design as a process where the designer empowers and guides users to develop solutions for them-

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

selves, thereby blurring the role between user and designer. In classical co-design processes, the designer and the user create solutions together, thereby making the final result more appropriate and acceptable to the user (Albinsson, Lind, et al; 2007). Co-design as a process therefore bears many similarities to classical co-creation processes within the innovation literature, e.g. Ramaswamy & Gouillart (2010).5 By using approaches and tools from the world of design, we were able to benefit from the skills the designers in the department were already highly skilled in using, just not on themselves. In this process, we were able to use those very same skills for analysing a complex situation in a completely new perspective, using the Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010). This was made possible because our designers are trained in identifying a problem, analysing user requirements, and discovering needs that users themselves are not even aware of, and subsequently translating these insights into new solutions (Sanders & Stappers 2008).

THE CO-DESIGN PROCESS

My overall purpose with the journey of innovation was to create a common language and understanding of our customers, securing structure and direction for changing the organisation. I was curious to explore whether co-design processes could work in an organisational change process, where no products and processes are at stake. Hence I designed a participatory process aiming at improving cross-disciplinary projects and processes within DR Design. I chose to involve employees from the beginning of the process, in the hope that they would take on more ownership of the process and of the actual implementation. Furthermore, by involving employees I would force myself to do away with preconceptions of how DR Design works and should be working, and instead be open towards completely different interpretations. Involving employees in this way also provided me with in-depth and highly context-dependent knowledge about the organisation, which is highly important for leadership insights (HĂ¸yrup et al., 2012). What I then saw was that staff, without further instructions, themselves acted on

Peter HĂ¸jer, DR / The innovation journey is one we create together

all low-hanging fruit initiatives. A few days after the workshop I was presented with an invoice for the purchase of equipment that would help solve a challenge. Employees clearly took ownership of the task, without awaiting management involvement. My impression was that they now had a completely different understanding of why we had to solve this challenge and therefore could not refrain from acting on the challenge - immediately. And as a manager, that was great to watch.

A FEELING OF UNITY

By inviting employees to participate in the co-design of our new organisation from the very beginning, we were able to shorten the implementation time significantly. We were also able to create better solutions, and maybe even more importantly, to get employees to take greater ownership of the solution. Another benefit to co-designing our organisation together with employees is that employees need to spend less time on trying to understand why the changes are actually made. In a co-design process, changes are made because they are deemed important by the employees themselves. During the co-design process and in the different workshops, we saw how employees would obtain greater insight into the work of their immediate peers and colleagues, and in this way gain access to, for example, concrete ways of solving challenges and strategies for how to handle customers. This gives me a stronger belief that the co-design methods are extremely helpful in achieving greater mutual understanding, especially in departments with great autonomy. And as one participant said: â&#x20AC;?You leave the workshop with a sense of unity.â&#x20AC;? But most importantly, co-design is extremely powerful for designing the organisations of the future, whilst learning about the organisations of the past.

16 Tales of Innovation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; methods, reflections and practice

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albinsson, L. & Lind, M. (2007). Co-Design: An approach to border crossing, Network Innovation. eChallenges 2007, The Hague, The Netherlands. Bason, Christian (2010). Leading Public Sector Innovation. Co-creating for a better society. Bristol: The Policy Press. Ghais, S. (2005). Extreme Facilitation. Guiding Groups through Controversy and Complexity San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Høyrup et al. (2012). Employee-Driven innovation – A New Approach, Palgrave Macmillan. Justice & Jamieson (2012). The Facilitators Fieldbook 3rd edition. HRD Press Kelley, T. & Kelley, D. (2013). Creative Confidence, Crown Business Kimbell (2009) Design practices in design thinking. European Acadamy og Management, Liverpool. Kimbell (2011) Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I. In Design and Culture, Vol. 3, Issue 3, pp. 285-306, Berg, London. Kimbell (2012) Rethinking Design Thinking: Part II. In Design and Culture, Vol. 4, Issue 2, pp. 129-148, Berg, London. Osterwalder, A. & Pigneur, Y. (2010) Business Model Ceneration. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Ramaswamy, V. & Gouillart, F. (2010). Building the Co-Creative Enterprise. Harvard Business Review, 88 (10), pp. 100-109, (8 sider) Sanders, E. & P Stappers, P. J. (2008) Co-creation and the new landscapes of design

Peter Højer, DR / The innovation journey is one we create together

By Katrine Schumann, Communicate2innovate

HELPING LOCAL HEROES TO INNOVATE MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS: A TALE OF FACILITATION Schumann was called in as a consultant to help build a bridge between the demands of top management and the needs of the local leader and co-workers, and used the facilitation approach discussed in the article.

The Author Katrine Schumann is Senior Consultant at communicate2innovate. Her research interests are in the facilitation of innovative processes in complex systems.

About the article Schumann was called in as a consultant to help build a bridge between the demands of top management and the needs of the local leader and co-workers, and used the facilitation approach discussed in the article.

Thomasmindeparken Kindergarten This case study took place at Thomasmindeparken Kindergarten, in Jammerbugt, a minor Danish municipality. Thomasmindeparken is a public kindergarten where the leaders’ responsibility is not only to lead ”downwards” within the physical boundaries of the kindergarten, but also to lead in the complex ”upwards” system of the public administration in the municipality.

QUITE OFTEN MIDDLE LEVEL LEADERS IN LARGE organisations face the challenge of implementing a management concept decided on by top management. More often than not, these concepts are designed and decided very far away from local, everyday practice, and without consulting middle level leadersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; needs. Sometimes the struggle for implementing concepts leads to the involvement of co-leaders and co-workers, with the hope of helping each other to find a meaningful yet loyal way of implementing the concept. In my case example, Thomasmindeparken Kindergarten, this work took the form of a seminar aiming at meeting this challenge:

HOW CAN WE TRANSFORM THE CONCEPT SET BY MANAGEMENT INTO A NEW, LOCAL LEADERSHIP TOOL THAT WILL BE VALUABLE IN PRACTICE?

Working as a professional facilitator, I opted for the chance not only to help the leaders and co-workers solve the problem, but also to explore the dynamics of facilitation. A facilitator can be defined as someone who uses knowledge of group processes to formulate and deliver the necessary structure for meeting interaction to be effective (Schuman, 2006), and hence the case study of Thomasmindeparken might provide new knowledge of facilitation. Engaging in an innovation process is proposed, in recent leadership theories and design thinking, as a process of first suspending past patterns of thinking about the problem, and second as a process of redirecting attention to observing practice in multiple ways, in order to see the problems and possible solutions anew (e.g. Scharmer, 2007; Kelley, 2004). Facilitating movement from the past to the exploration of new possibilities is discussed as a process of guiding the group from the world of reason to the world of imagination, through a buffer zone, where negotiation of rules and expectations takes place (Thorsted, 2013). Without a feeling of trust, the group will not fully engage in the innovation process, thus making the buffer zone a crucial zone for the dynamics both within the group and in relation to their relationship towards the facilitator (Thorsted, 2013; DarsĂ¸, 2011). A group that is rushed and pushed across the threshold may enter the world of imagination, creativity and exploration with a lack of both meaning and trust. They may engage in experimenting as a form of teambuilding or play, but will often ask themselves: is this helping us solve our problem or is this just a ridiculous

Katrine Schumann, Communicate2innovate / A tale of facilitation

pastime that we cannot afford as serious and ambitious leaders and co-workers? (Åkerstrøm, 2008) This article addresses how a facilitator can help a group to cross the threshold between the patterns of the past and possible future solutions, focusing on the very start of the process, where expectations, rules and relationships are formed.

FACILITATION AS A STORY OF HEROES ON A QUEST

I was intrigued to find out more about the dynamics helping the group to see their challenge anew, and in order to learn more about facilitation I explored the case from a narrative perspective as a story of heroes on a quest, with both villains and helpers constructing the drama (Reason & Bradbury, 2002; Propp, 1968). We can perceive the leaders and co-workers as the story’s heroes, starting out on a difficult quest to gain a valuable new leadership tool; the sender being the administration in the municipality. The villains, the heroes have to fight are whatever group dynamics keep them reproducing old patterns of thinking and acting. In the case of Thomasmindeparken, the villains presented themselves when the leaders spoke of the administration and the management tool as ‘just another bureaucratic tool, that did not make sense’; when the group reproduced the pattern of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, pointing to the distance and lack of communication between the professionals and the administration, and in sentences starting with “we’re used to…”. In the light of narrative theory, the aid comes in the role of the helper. And often, the helper provides the help in the form of both obstacles and tools. He sets very strict rules and provokes the heroes to push themselves to the limit to actually use the help provided. In the old tales, this is how enough courage and creativity, to pursue the quest is fostered. The dynamic in the old folk tales is not created by the heroes in pursuit of the quest, but in the shifting dynamics of villains and helpers (Propp, 1968). In this light, the facilitator is the aid serving the group in working together to accomplish their task (Ghais, 2008). And he/she may well play the role of the helper in the folk tales, providing help to fight the villains, but help that provokes the group while still developing their creativity and courage, facilitating the desire

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

to actually want to create new solutions, thus helping them to let go of past patterns. The case study reports on three tools that the facilitator provides for the group, to help them engage in the innovation challenge: 1. A set code of conduct, that they are expected not to break. 2. A roadmap to the world of innovation, that they are expected to use. 3. A positive, inspirational and nurturing attitude from the facilitator.

THE CODE OF CONDUCT

The code of conduct sets up rules that will help the group to work together and is often created as an ethical code of behaving (Hunter, 2009). In this case, the code of conduct referred to was: 1. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even try to be ingenious. 2. We have exactly the amount of time and resources we need to fulfil the task. 3. No limitations regarding experiments, ideas and solutions. The group pointed to these three rules as crucial help for them to engage in the innovation process. It helped them break their norms and allowed them to work creatively. In dramatic terms, we are eager to understand the underlying dynamics of the code of conduct: why do these three rules help the group? First of all, because the group needs them! They are like heroes on a quest on the lookout for help, and they are clutching at straws. Any code of conduct will help, if anything just to make the group less anxious, as Stacey points out, when speaking of management strategy and plans (Stacey, 2002). But these particular rules also provoked the group to invert the traditional thinking in their workplace: 1. Call in the experts - it takes genius to solve this. 2. Go for compromises - we never have enough time or resources to create excellent solutions. 3. Be realistic - the budget is king and the quality standard is queen.

Katrine Schumann, Communicate2innovate / A tale of facilitation

The help in the code of conduct first made the leaders and co-workers laugh, and as they realised it was meant as serious help, it provoked them to engage in the process and stopped them from trying to impress each other and from playing it safe. Instead it created immediate access to creativity and helped them play, dream, experiment and explore, they said (Schumann, 2009).

THE ROADMAP TO THE WORLD OF INNOVATION

The second help provided by the facilitator was a simple roadmap of an innovation process, by which the group could orient themselves in the quest for a new solution. In this case the roadmap was Theory U (Scharmer, 2007), but the specific theory or model was really not important to the group. The roadmap made the group feel that they were on solid ground and yet on totally new ground, as it both provided them with a theoretical framework that they felt they could trust, and with a framework that was aiming at breaking traditions of how they work together on a task (Schumann, 2009). And in that sense, the roadmap is to the group as the structure of the tale is to the heroes on a quest: a structure that allows threatening things to happen and to be overcome. The roadmap comforts the group and as the code of conduct, it functions to reduce anxiety and prepare for the unknown.

THE ATTITUDE OF THE FACILITATOR

In folk tales, the magic help is often offered to the heroes by a person who is older and wiser than the young heroes. It may be a wicked person like a witch or a magician testing the heroes, but the character of the helper is always special (Propp, 1968). The co-workers and leaders accordingly speak of their facilitator as a special character, from whom they felt a positive attitude that inspired them and made them feel influential (Schumann, 2009). Examining this in the light of narrative structure, the third help in facilitation is not a concept or tool provided for the heroes to use. Instead it is the presence and leadership of a facilitator with a positive, inspirational and nurturing attitude towards the group and their task.

16 Tales of Innovation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; methods, reflections and practice

The group dynamics in innovation processes are vital to prevent the group from re-enacting traditional patterns of action and to lever their communication towards more explorative conversations (DarsĂ¸, 2001). The group dynamics need to nurture trustful relationships for the individuals to propose new experimental ways of looking and solving the challenge. The facilitatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s persona must create and uphold a sense of trust and create a container for the anxiety that arises when a group faces a challenge that they do not know how to handle. To provide this container and guide the group through controversy and complexity, the facilitator may not just think of herself as a tool, but as an authentic person with her own style and values (Ghais, 2005). In this action research case study, the facilitator was me, and thus the study reflects upon my style and values, as they are perceived by the group.

THE FACILITATOR BALANCING CREATIVITY AND CONSTRAINT

Looking back on the three helping factors that the facilitator provides for the group, it is an evident pattern that the help is reducing anxiety in the group. The group reports that these three factors freed their ability and will to work creatively and experimentally with their challenge. But why do these three factors help the group cross the border from the world of reason to the world of imagination? A possible answer could be that they balance the need for both creativity and constraint. It is the dynamic balance of communicating and organising through creativity and constraint that enables the group to work effectively on their task (Eisenberg & Goodall, 2001). A group does not only need facilitation towards the suspension of past patterns and tools for creativity to work towards innovation. They also need constraint, provided by traditions, patterns and trust. In this case, the code of conduct provided a structure both constraining, as a set form of rules, AND supporting creativity, as the rules were turning traditional norms on their heads. The roadmap had the function of a constraining factor, giving a feeling of safety in terms of a theoretically-based model AND it pushed for creativity through the nature of Theory U, being a model of innovation. The facilitator was the person who proved trustworthy and inspirational enough to balance the group dynamics with these two structures.

Katrine Schumann, Communicate2innovate / A tale of facilitation

It is crucial to innovative processes that a group is able to move from the world of reason and tradition and enter the world of imagination, exploration and creativity. Leaders may recognise this challenge, and call upon a facilitator to help to create the needed structure for an effective work process. The facilitator is not to be seen as a hero in these processes, but merely an aid, who provides help in the form of challenging codes of conduct, providing roadmaps to the unknown, and producing the comforting feeling of having a trusting relationship.

DID THE HEROES SUCCEED IN THE QUEST?

The tiny part of the case study presented here focuses on facilitating the entrance to innovative processes. Innovation, however, is judged retrospectively on the value, the new solution created. And indeed, the group succeeded in creating a new, local leadership tool AND still remaining loyal to the administration’s management-by-contract-tool: “When it all came together as tangible plans in the end, it was so obvious that nothing is impossible, and that what we dream of can become real. What we created that day was visionary. We created our 12-year plan. OUR vision. OUR plan of action. OUR criteria for success. We embraced our possibilities and got rid of the stuff that felt constraining. The vision and plans crystallised towards the end of the day, as we transformed our work into the set management contract: 12 year vision. 7, 3 and 1 year plans. Now, 6 years after, this is what we still lean on and create our future from” Leader, Thomasmindeparken.

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Darsø, Lotte (2013): Innovationspædagogik, Samfundslitteratur Darsø, Lotte (2001): Innovation in the making, Samfundslitteratur Eisenberg, Eric M. & H.L. Goodall (2001):Organizational Communication, Bedford St. Martins Ghais, Suzanne (2005): Extreme facilitation, CDR associates Hunter, Dale (2009): The art of facilitation, John Wiley & Sons. Kelley, Tom (2004): The art of innovation, Profile Books Scharmer, C. Otto (2007): Theory U. Leading from the future as it emerges. SoL. Schuman, Sandy ed (2006): Creating a cultre of collaboration – the IAF handbook. Jossey Bass. Schumann, Katrine (2009): Communicate to innovate. Facilitating innovation in complex systems. LAICS Master thesis. Schumann, Katrine (2014): Kan vi lege os til fornyelse i offentlig ledelse?, in Erhvervspsykologi, vol 12, #2, p. 22-33. Stacey, Ralph (2002): Organizations as complex responsive processes of relating. In Journal of Innovative Management, vol 8. #2, p. 27-42. Thorsted, Ann Charlotte (2013): Den legende organisation. L&R Business Propp, Vladimir (1968). Morphology of the Folk Tale. University of Texas Press Reason, Peter & Hilary Bradbury eds (2001): Handbook of action research. Sage Pub. Åkerstrøm, Niels A. (2008): Legende magt. Hans Reizels Forlag

Katrine Schumann, Communicate2innovate / A tale of facilitation

By Henrik Grothe, Danish Technological Institute (DMRI)

IMPLEMENTATION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY The article analyses this process, describes the model used and puts it into a theoretical perspective.

The Author Henrik Grothe is employed by the Danish Technological Institute (DMRI), as Section Manager. He carried out this study at Dat Schaub amba, a part of the Danish meat industry.

About the article The article analyses this process, describes the model used and puts it into a theoretical perspective.

Dat Schaub amba The company have been automating extensively during the last ten years. The case study is about the implementation of an advanced manufacturing machine that was invented by TI-DMRI in cooperation with Dat Schaub, and later on set into production at two of Dat Schaubâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s production sites. The implementation process ended up delivering a method for implementation.

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF TECHNOLOGY is often seen as a purely technical matter, but more often than not technological perfection is only halfway to a successful implementation. This article argues that implementation is a complex learning process, involving not only technical aspects but also elements of Communities of Practice (COP)(Lave & Wenger, 1991). The article proposes a model for implementation that adapts the implementation process to, on the one hand, technological maturity and, on the other hand, the organisation that receives the technology.

WHY FOCUS ON IMPLEMENTATION? The implementation of technology in manufacturing processes is often handled as a routine task, based on a mechanistic approach which considers it primarily as a matter of technical and logistical issues, where the social aspects of implementation are reduced to handling resistance (Long & Spurlock, 2008, Elitan, 2012). This approach appears to underestimate important parameters in terms of learning and adaptation processes, which may give a clue as to why more than 50 per cent of all implementations in the US are reported to fail (Klein, 2005). Not only do these failures result in economic losses, but they also deprive the industry of competitive advantages, the latter being the most critical in a world in which growth is determined by the ability to benefit from innovation. This study has focused on the automation of the Danish meat industry (DMI). It is an industry where automation is vital to staying ahead and remaining competitive in the world market (Hinrichsen, 2010). It is also an industry that to a large extent relies on unskilled labour and therefore faces gaps in terms of knowledge and competencies (The Danish Government, 2013) when it comes to handling advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) (Saberi, et al., 2010). These visible gaps make the DMI an interesting case to study - interesting both because the challenges the DMI faces are founded in the social construction and seem to be of a generic nature when compared with reportings from other industries (Leonard-Barton, 1992, Saberi, et al., 2010) and because, as this particular case shows, parts of the DMI seem to have developed a successful model for handling these gaps. The idea initially emerged because DMRIÂ´s (Danish Meat Research Institute)

Henrik Grothe, DMRI / Implementation of new technology

started deploying development activities to the production department, using operators as members of the developing team and the production department as a laboratory. The case used for this research covers both an expert-based development and implementation, where the technology was handed over to the production department as a final solution, and a development and implementation where the production department was used as a laboratory. The case indicates that the latter method produces the best results in terms of ownership. It was therefore interesting to find out what makes this method more successful. The focus was aimed at implementation, because it is here that technical misfits and lack of commitment and acceptance become visible, which led to the research question: how does the maturity of a technology and user involvement influence the implementation process? This led to a model including elements described in the context of Communities of Practice (COP) and the later development of the COP paradigm (Probst & Borzillo, 2008).

METHODS USED

The study was conducted as a qualitative case study of a single representative case, and the method was inspired by second person action research (Reason & Bradbury, 2001). The single case study (Yin, 2009) was chosen because it provided a unique opportunity to look at identical technology, implemented in different settings, under different conditions, but with similar prerequisites. The research process can be divided into four overall sections: literature study, empirical work, analysis and reporting. The literature study started with a broad search for literature on implementation and was narrowed down to a search for literature on the implementation of AMT and the most generic part of the literature on the implementation of IT systems. Based on the literature study, a series of issues was identified that became the

16 Tales of Innovation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; methods, reflections and practice

core of the empirical work. The empirical work took the form of a workshop with employees and the operational management, while the top management was addressed via a focus group interview (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). Finally, the drivers of the implementation process were included via two discursive interviews (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). The analysis was conducted based on recordings that were transcribed and organised according to the categories that had been identified during the literature study. Having the empirical material organised and visually presented started the meaning condensation (Kvale, 1996). The meaning condensation not only linked the statements from the different sources, it also gave an insight into the underlying narratives, which became very apparent during this process. Finally, the condensation revealed some interesting discrepancies that made it possible to see different perspectives.

FINDINGS: TECHNOLOGY MATURITY AND IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY AS KEY FACTORS

The study ended up identifying technology maturity and implementation strategy as determining the outcome of the implementation process. This has led to the development of a model consisting of four processes, separated by two axes representing the determining factors (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Implementation model.

Henrik Grothe, DMRI / Implementation of new technology

The horizontal axis represents the implementation strategy, ranging from seeing implementation as mutual adaptation (Leonard-Barton, 1988) to seeing implementation as adoption (Straub, 2009) of new technology and a matter of overcoming resistance to change (Elitan, 2012). The vertical axis represents a continuum of technology maturity, ranging from invention to proven technology. The invention is characterised by incomplete knowledge - the solution has yet to be fully invented. The proven technology, on the other hand, is when coherent knowledge about the technology has been established, including extensive experience in its use. The model shows two possible intermediate processes: an adaptation process, in which learning is central, and an expert-based process, which is primarily aimed at technical perfection. The study indicated that the adaptation process is the most efficient, since it keeps developing performance and builds experience, leading to a positive environment and results that gradually improve. The expert process experiences a drop in performance after handover, because the organisation does not start building experience until the technology has been handed over. This means that the technology will start its adaptation process in an environment in which the expected results have not been achieved, which, in the worst case, can lead to rejection. The proposed adaptation process consists of three types of implementation drivers (Figure 2 Implementation drivers and handover), who convey knowledge and responsibility from the developers to the production floor. This study uses the terms development supporter (DS), expert user (EU) and finally super user (SU). The DS is part of the development team and is someone who has a deep insight into the technology and its background. The EU is a person from the receiving organisation who is appointed to be the key person for this specific technology, since he/she is the one who always has the most extensive and updated knowledge within the organisation. The SU is appointed at each site where the technology is deployed, and acts both as a supporter on a daily basis and as a link to further support via the EU. This set-up of implementation drivers provides the basis for COPs that can maintain and develop canonical practice (Brown & Duguid, 1991),

16 Tales of Innovation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; methods, reflections and practice

with the EU acting as leader and the DS providing external expertise (Probst & Borzillo, 2008). At the same time, they build a supportive environment in which the participants will receive support whenever they accept responsibility for a new technology. The expert process is based on the handover between a DS and an end user after a test and training period. This study shows how this process can fail because the formal training is not capable of building up sufficient experience and because responsibility is not accepted by the persons it is given to, due to lack of efficacy (Bandura, 1994/1998) and support opportunities.

Figure 2: Implementation drivers and handoverdel.

The conclusion of this study is that maturity determines the choice of implementation process and that expert processes should only be employed when the technology is mature and the receiving organisation has gained sufficient experience with the technology.

Henrik Grothe, DMRI / Implementation of new technology

In cases where the technology is new to the organisation, a mutual adaptation process will be the most beneficial in the long run, even though the initial cost may be higher and the implementation time longer.

PERSPECTIVES

I hope this model will enable practitioners to view implementation from a learning perspective, thereby providing the basis for new implementation strategies that will improve the value of new manufacturing technology and support an environment of continuous development and user-driven innovation.

16 Tales of Innovation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; methods, reflections and practice

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bandura, A.-., 1994/1998. Self-efficacy. I: I. V. R. (Ed.), red. Encyclopedia of Human Behavior vol 4. New York: Academic Press, pp. pp. 71-81. Boudreau, M.-C. & Robey, D., 2005. Enacting Integrated Information Technology: A Human Agency Perspective. Organization Science, 16(1), pp. 3-18. Brown, J. S. & Duguid, P., 1991. Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation. Organization Science , March, pp. 40-57. Danish Government, the, 2013. Danmark i arbejde - VĂŚkstplan for fĂ¸devarer, Copenhagen: Danish Ministry of Business and Growth. Elitan, L., 2012. Adopting and implementing advanced manufacturing technology - Problems, Benefits, and Performance Appraisal Techniques. INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STUDIES, 1(1), pp. 71-102. Hinrichsen, L., 2010. Manufacturing technology in the Danish pig slaughter industry. Meat Science, February , 84(2), pp. 271-275. Klein, K. j., 2005. Innovation implementation. Current directions in psychological science, October, pp. 243-246. Kvale , S. & Brinkmann, S., 2009. Interviews. second edition ed. Thosusand Oaks: SAGE. Kvale, S., 1996. Interviews. London: Sage publications. Lave, J. & Wenger, E., 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, Oxford. Leonard-Barton, D., 1988. Implementation as mutual adaption of technology. Research Policy, 17(17), pp. 251-267.

Henrik Grothe, DMRI / Implementation of new technology

Leonard-Barton, D., 1992. The Factory as a Learning Laboratory. Sloan Management Review, 34(1), pp. 23-38. Long, S. & Spurlock, D. G., 2008. Motivation and stakeholder acceptance in technology-driven change management: implications for the engineering manager. Engineering mangement journal, June, pp. 30-36. Probst, G. & Borzillo, S., 2008. Why communities of practices succeed and why they fail. European management journal, pp. 335-347. Reason, P. & Bradbury, H., 2001. Handbook of Action Research. Participative Inquiry and Practice. In: s.l.:Sage publications, pp. pp. 1-14, pp 179-188, pp 448-455. Saberi, S., Yusuff, R. M., Zulkifli, N. & Megat , M. A., 2010. Effective Factors on Advanced Manufacturing Technology Implementation Performance: A Review. Journal of Applied Sciences, 10, pp. 1229-1242. Straub, E. T., 2009. Understanding technology Adoption: Theory and Future Directions for Informal Learning. Review of Educational Research, June, pp. 625-649. Yin, R. K., 2009. Case study Research Design and Methods. vol.5 ed. Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc.

16 Tales of Innovation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; methods, reflections and practice

By Helle Winding, VIA Teko Design & Business

THE 5F MODEL: AN ITERATIVE MODEL TO BOOST INNOVATION Windingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s study concentrates on the 5F model, an iterative model to boost innovation. The article suggests approaches, processes and a variety of tools for boosting creativity and innovation.

The Author Helle Winding is Director of Education at VIA Teko Design & Business.

About the article Windingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s study concentrates on the 5F model, an iterative model to boost innovation. The article suggests approaches, processes and a variety of tools for boosting creativity and innovation.

VIA Teko Design & Business The school is based in Herning, Jutland, and is Scandinaviaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest lifestyle school with 1,100 students. The two major departments of the University College are Design and Business, respectively. The Business courses comprise Purchasing Management, Brand Management, Retail Management, Retail Design, Entrepreneurship and Communication & Media Strategy. The Design courses comprise: Fashion Design, Furniture Design, Pattern Design and Visual Fashion Communication.

IN 2013 VIA TEKO DESIGN AND BUSINESS asked, “How can we capitalise on

the synergy between design and business approaches to boost innovation?” We went on a quest to deliver an answer that would work in practice. A small taskforce of dedicated researchers from Design and Business spent months digging through multiple models and theories about ‘design thinking’, ‘strategic design’, and ‘design innovation’ and started to test approaches in practice. Based on our findings we came up with a new model for Strategic Design Practice, the 5F model. The model capitalises on the synergy created by combining approaches from the educational programmes Business and Design, to identify challenges, generate ideas, and come up with novel solutions. It creates the basis for a common language and understanding, allowing students from Design to add value to the Business programme and students from Business to become better innovators. The aim with this iterative model is to boost innovation competencies in a world filled with open, complex problems. In the following article I will describe the model step-by-step and give examples of how the model has been applied to real-world challenges in organisational settings.

THE 5F MODEL – FIND – FRAME – FORM – FABRICATE – FULFILL

Strategic Design Practice, Model, 2014, animation film, VIA Teko Design & Business.

Helle Winding, VIA Teko Design & Business / The 5F Model

PHASE 1: FIND

Strategic Design Practice, Find, 2014, animation film, VIA Teko Design & Business.

Phase 1 FIND is the qualitative research phase. It is the discovery phase, embracing a deep and fundamental understanding of the market/client/technology and their needs, which may include insights from ethnography and observing real people in real-life situations, rather than questionnaires or focus groups. An attempt is made to also understand the market as a whole, which should result in empathising with consumers - connecting with them rather than regarding them as people to be segmented and targeted for sales. Insights gained are used to accurately “frame” the project outcomes. A key to this phase is also looking at trends, thereby utilising the knowledge of today to appreciate what we do not know in tomorrow’s society.

PHASE 2: FRAME

Strategic Design Practice, Frame, 2014, animation film, VIA Teko Design & Business.

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

Phase 2 FRAME is all about constructing the design brief based on design techniques. The focus is the project definition, which can also be referred to as the design brief, giving the project team constraints and a framework. Information from phase one “Find” is collected and displayed in a visual representation. The idea is to generate discussions and visualise key findings and insights, thus providing design opportunities which enable the team to frame objective(s) embracing the underlying user needs. The iterative process starts, assessing the team’s knowledge, and it might lead the team to return to Phase 1. In this phase the idea must be clarified, as Paul Pangaro (2008) states, “Design can be perceived as something we want to make better and then the activity of making it better, as it often starts with someone seeing a problem.” The question for the design thinker is whether the stated problem is represented in the actual problem we observe, which illustrates the power of framing by asking “Why?” (Sara Beckman 2007).

PHASE 3: FORM

Strategic Design Practice, Form, 2014, animation film, VIA Teko Design & Business.

Phase 3 FORM is all about visualisation and idea generation based on the design techniques. The Form phase is also referred to as ideation - the creative process of generating, developing and communicating new ideas (Brown, 2009). This comprises intensive brainstorming sessions which are a central part of design thinking theories, and it is important to visualise concepts using sticky notes, mark-

Helle Winding, VIA Teko Design & Business / The 5F Model

ers, sketches, diagrams, storytelling etc. which are new methods for business people (Martin, 2009), (Liedtka et al, 2011). A key element of design thinking is the use of multi-disciplinary teams (Brown, 2009). “Hot Project Teams” consist of members of widely divergent education and experience, and they form the basis of the design consulting firm IDEO’s approach, as the idea of innovation coming from lone creative geniuses is a myth that gets in the way of organisations’ real potential for innovation and creativity. The teams get clear challenging goals and deadlines, and they are empowered to do whatever is needed to complete the task. Synthesis of ideas is an abductive sense making process- a process of combining ideas into a tangible form that can be defined, discussed, accepted or rejected. (Brown, 2009) It is a way in which the insights gained from Phase 1 (FIND) can lead to innovative compelling ideas, and can be defined as the act of extracting meaningful patterns from masses of raw information. Abductive reasoning is another important part of this stage of the design thinking process. We “take our best shot” or “take our best guess” - which is a useful tactic when the information we have is incomplete, (a common situation in business). It brings seemingly unrelated facts together by an intuition of connectedness, resulting in some form of hypothesis. At this stage of the process we are in divergent thinking mode, a process used to generate a large number of ideas in a spontaneous manner by exploring many possible solutions with the objective of multiplying options, thereby creating a basis for making choices. Convergent thinking will be used later as a way of deciding amongst existing alternatives. According to Tim Brown (2009), divergent and convergent thinking, analysis and synthesis are at the core of design thinking.

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PHASE 4: FABRICATE

Strategic Design Practice, Fabricate, 2014, animation film, VIA Teko Design & Business

Phase 4 FABRICATE is Rapid Prototyping. This phase is one of the really significant differences between design thinking and conventional thinking. A prototype is anything a person can look at and respond to and the shorthand of innovation. It involves creating visual representations of concepts. Kelley (2009) likens it to “thinking with your hands”. In the words of Tim Brown (2009), “Prototypes may bring an abstract idea to life in a way the whole organization can understand and engage with. In business we are used to thinking without drawing or prototyping but without techniques such as prototyping, it is difficult to make your ideas explicit enough for others to understand and provide feedback”. The rationale behind prototyping is that your first idea will probably not be your best one, and if a picture is worth 1000 words a prototype must be worth 100,000. Prototypes should be built early and often, can be 2D or 3D and may take minutes or hours to construct. In design thinking, this process is called iteration – the act of repeating a process with the aim of making improvements to reach the desired goal. Towards the end of the prototyping phase the convergent thinking phase is entered, with the focus on solving the design question.

Helle Winding, VIA Teko Design & Business / The 5F Model

PHASE 5: FULFILL

Strategic Design Practice, Fulfil, 2014, animation film, VIA Teko Design & Business.

Phase 5 FULFILL is about launching the design, product, services, etc. based on Business thinking, with the challenge of implementing the solution and achieving learnings as quickly as possible. Convergent thinking applies, and the task is to arrive at the best possible solution and implement a test launch. To determine which of the designs will meet the needs expressed in phase 1 and framed in phase 2, it is necessary to test the viability of the design - or to put in another way, to test the future in the present, which is no easy task. However, some techniques can lead to satisfactory results, and these include: •

Assumption testing: an attempt to predict the attractiveness of the design or the concept.

•

Customer co-creation: a business strategy where value is created by involving customers in the development process.

•

Learning launches: proposed by Liedtka & Ogilvie (2011) as a method of concept evaluation. They are limited and inexpensive experiments carried out in the marketplace or organisation using a 4D prototype and 3D experience that persists over time. The aim is to simulate how the solution will operate at full-scale and it should be as real as possible to capture real customer reactions.

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DOES THE 5F MODEL WORK AS INTENDED?

The evidence so far suggests that the 5F model does in fact help teams convert design practices into successful business strategies by putting the pieces together. The key elements are user understanding, visualisation, prototyping and strategic business modelling.

TESTED IN REAL LIFE

The model has been tested with promising results, exemplified by the two cases below:

Case 1 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The company Viking Life Saving Equipment Provides essential safety and fire-fighting equipment to the following segments: passenger, cargo, offshore, defence, fishing, yachting and fire. The structure of the brand was complex: their DNA and great stories were hidden in technical information targeted at specialists. The outcome of the workshop was a series of innovative and deceptively simple approaches to how they could bring their brand to life, leading to cheers and applause from the company executives.

Case 2 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; OW Interior, a company delivering safety systems to airports. The challenge was to make the entire check-in process a positive, easy and comfortable experience. In spite of the inherent constraints, the team came up with three different concepts, which not only made the experience easier and more comfortable, but also made the check-in process something to look forward to and to tell good stories about afterwards. The three concepts are now to be tested (fulfilled) in Paris and Oslo.

Helle Winding, VIA Teko Design & Business / The 5F Model

THE FUTURE IS PROMISING

The Strategic Design Practice 5F Model has turned out to be well worth the quest. It is easy to communicate, it bridges Design and Business, and helps teams identify challenges, generate ideas, and come up with novel solutions. The model was introduced to the public at Design Days in Brussels in late September 2014, and the three-person task force has been expanded to include two new researchers. Many tasks are awaiting the team, such as continuous iteration and testing of the 5F Model, developing new tools, optimising qualitative research methods, and posing new questions such as how to prototype and convert prototypes into strategies.

16 Tales of Innovation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; methods, reflections and practice

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beckman, L. Sara et. Al, Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking (2007), Berkeley University of California Dorst, Kees, The Nature of Design Thinking (2011) (link:http://www3.nd.edu/~amurniek/assets/DTRS8-Dorst.pdf) Kelley, T. (2006), The Ten Faces of Innovation, London: Profile Books LTD Kelley, T. (2004), The Art of Innovation, London: Profile Books LTD Kimbell, Lucy (2009). Beyond Design Thinking: Design-as-practice and Designs-in-practice Kimbell, L., (2011) Rethinking Design Thinking, Design and Culture, Volume 3, Number 3 Harvard Business Review Martin, R. (2009), The Design of Business, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press Pangaro, Paul, Title: Instructions for Design and Designs for Conversation, article, 2008 (http://www.pangaro.com/published/Instructions-and-Design-and-Conversation.pdf)

Helle Winding, VIA Teko Design & Business / The 5F Model

By Susanne Dahl, Bikuben Foundation

WALKING A MILE IN THE SHOES OF A HOMELESS YOUNGSTER CREATING STRONGER PHILANTHROPY THROUGH USER ENGAGEMENT IN THE PROCESS OF COLLECTIVE IMPACT

Dahl’s article focuses on the methodology of collective impact in relation to philanthropy.

The Author Susanne Dahl works at the Bikuben Foundation as Head Advisor – strategy and program development.

About the article Dahl’s article focuses on the methodology of collective impact in relation to philanthropy. Bikuben Foundation The Bikuben Foundation is based in Copenhagen, and supports mainly social and cultural projects throughout Denmark and Greenland. It allocates funds from its returns and capital to benefit Danish and Greenlandish society. In 2014 the foundation granted about 7 million Euros to benefit the public good. The theme linking the multitude of activities is the goal to “make Denmark greater”. The ambition is to promote insight and vision in society by supporting and developing high-quality projects of lasting value to society in Denmark and Greenland, within culture, natural resources, education and social work..

”IT’S EASIER TO ACT YOUR WAY INTO A NEW WAY OF THINKING THAN TO THINK YOURSELF INTO A NEW WAY OF ACTING.”

(Richard Pascal, 2001). As the strategic approach to philanthropy - the practice of giving money and time to help make life better for other people - swept across the field of foundations in Denmark, many grant-makers lost their appetite for funding experimental and innovative projects. In 2014, the Danish foundation the Bikuben Foundation initiated a journey exploring how to deliberately reintroduce new ways of working - facilitating change as a supplement to the roles of the foundation as donor (giving a donation to a project), partner (teaming up in a shared initiative for a common project) and driver (developing new solutions to be carried out by the foundation itself) of singular, isolated projects in the cultural or social field (John Kania et. al, 2011). Facing a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittle, 2007) - the increasing number of homeless youngsters in Denmark - and with a limited amount of money for the initiative compared to the size and complexity, in spring 2014 the Bikuben Foundation took the initiative in creating new ways of working as a foundation in this specific field, based on the methodology of Collective Impact. Collective Impact is defined as “the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda to solve a specific problem” (John Kania and Mark Kramer, Stanford Social Innovation Review 2014, p. 39). Collective Impact is also described as an approach based on a structured and analytical process that brings together different sectors and actors to create solutions to complex challenges. The philosophy that Collective Impact is based upon is that sustainable solutions to complex problems on a large scale can only be created through a process where several sectors and organizations - public, private and NGO’s - systematically coordinate their actions and work together based on clear goals. The approach is closely linked to the theories and practice of co-creation, which is a method focusing on creating new solutions together WITH a target group instead of FOR them. Co-creation is an open, though designed, process constantly building upon the target group’s ideas and feedback. Experts and users are engaged as active partners, co-creating themes, conclusions and solutions. Co-creation is a typical methodology in the field of design and is NOT

Susanne Dahl, Bikuben Foundation / Walking a mile in the shoes of a homeless youngster

just bringing people together, but engaging them strategically and actively in the development and implementation of new solutions. (C. K. Prahalad og Remkat Ramaswamy, 2000) This article introduces parts of the design of the Collective Impact-quest that the Bikuben Foundation has initiated (2014-2015). It also argues for the importance of using the crucial supplement of user engagement in the processes of Collective Impact. Furthermore, it introduces a new model illustrating the level of user engagement based on the first experimental steps of engaging the homeless youngsters in the grant process.

A NEW PARADIGM OF DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE

In the Danish foundation the Bikuben Foundation, an initiative has been taken in order to find new solutions to a wicked social problem: the increasing number of homeless youngsters in Denmark. The argument for prioritising this specific target group was: •

A wicked problem with many interdependencies with no clear solution: in Denmark approximately 6000 people are registered as homeless, and half of them are registered in the Copenhagen area. The number has been relatively stable since 2007, but the number of young homeless has increased dramatically from 633 in 2009 to 1.138 in 2013, in the age group of 18 to 24 (Lars Benjaminsen & Heidi Hesselberg Lauritzen, SFI, (2013)). The problem is caused by a complex mix of individual accidents and events with general factors such as mental illness and drug abuse combined with the recession and the few low price apartments available in the capital area.

•

Roots of the foundation: between 2007 and 2013 the Bikuben Foundation has made significant donations to three projects or institutions, a total of 3.668.400 kr.

•

Accessible network: the foundation has a solid network in the field of homelessness on which to build the initiative (in research, shelters, projects, other foundations etc.)

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

The previous donations mentioned above had been given based on a classical Stage Gate-inspired process model that most foundations use. The original Stage Gate model can be viewed as a sequential relay race (Takeuchi & Nonaka, 1986) where one function completes a set of work tasks and then passes the results to the next function in line:

Illustration narrowed down from the illustration in the year book of Bikuben Foundation 2013 page 9. Closely related to the illustration of Monday Morning 2013, p. 11.

The process is lean, transparent and delivery oriented. The model is open, leaving room for the secretary to discuss and contribute what is necessary to move along and deliver. But it has the weakness of not encouraging or requiring the opening up of debate and the involvement of other external parties, or the target group itself. Hence the model does not take into account interaction and interference from other external parties.

AN ADAPTIVE APPROACH TO PHILANTHROPY

Based on the insights of the complexity theory perspective (Stacey, 2003, 2005, 2007), traditional approaches to donations are limited and ought to be carried out using a much more non-linear and facilitating approach, in order to create a larger and more sustainable social impact. Hence, attention must be directed from a clas-

Susanne Dahl, Bikuben Foundation / Waking a mile in the shoes of a homeless youngster

sical strategic choice of method to seeing the field as a complex adaptive system, where the field is constantly learning and changing through interactions. In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the approach of catalyst philanthropy in contrast with traditional philanthropy (donations given to individual projects according to the choice of the board) and strategic philanthropy (strategically chosen projects based on partnerships and initiatives) (Mandag Morgen, 2013). As an operational approach to catalyst philanthropy, the methodology Collective Impact was introduced by Mark Kramer in an article in Stanford Social Innovation Review (2011). As the common approach to philanthropy in Danish foundations has for many years been based upon the goal of achieving an isolated, documented effect of a single project, the underlying premise of Collective Impact is that no single organisation, institution or project can create sustainable change for complex problems on a large scale. Also, complex problems might not be solved by one single means or set of tools replicated by the work of one single organisation. Strong organisations and actions are necessary, but not sufficient. Hence Collective Impact has been launched as a significant shift in the way of thinking and working in the social sector, by working across silos and reintroducing the concept of risk in the processes and donations of foundations.

16 Tales of Innovation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; methods, reflections and practice

On collective impact: Collective Impact is an approach based on a structured and analytical process that brings together different sectors and actors to create common solutions to complex challenges. The process is based on the following steps: 1. Common Agenda: All participants have a shared vision for change including a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to solving it through agreed-upon actions. 2. Shared Measurement: Collecting data and measuring results consistently across all participants ensures efforts remain aligned and participants hold each other accountable. 3. Mutually Reinforcing Activities: Participant activities must be differentiated while still being coordinated through a mutually reinforcing plan of action. 4. Continuous Communication: Consistent and open communication is needed across the many players to build trust, assure mutual objectives, and create common motivation. 5. Backbone Organization: Creating and managing Collective Impact requires a separate organization(s) with staff and a specific set of skills to serve as the backbone for the entire initiative and coordinate participation organizations and agencies. (John Kania et. al. Stanford Social Innovation Review (2014) p. 2)

The collective impact approach demands a different approach from the Stage Gate model and calls for the metaphor of a common journey (Van de Venn, 1999), where the foundation facilitates the process of change. Hence the role of the Bikuben Foundation in this specific case was changed from donating money

Susanne Dahl, Bikuben Foundation / Waking a mile in the shoes of a homeless youngster

to projects to investing in a common, cross-sectoral process involving all stakeholders in the field of homelessness in Denmark. At this point other foundations have been engaged in this process and the work of identifying the community to be engaged in the process is in progress.

TAKING THE FIRST STEPS

Despite the proven results of Collective Impact abroad and the attention attracted by the methodology among foundations operating in the social field, there is a lack of proven cases in a Danish context. Furthermore recent research on Collective Impact (John Kania et. al, Stanfort Social Review (2014)) reinforces the fact that the softer dimensions of the process are essential to successfully achieving Collective Impact: one must consider who is engaged, how they work together, and how progress happens. The question of engaging the user has inspired the Bikuben Foundation to investigate the crucial question: How might the young homeless themselves be engaged in the Collective Impact process, and how will the initiative and the youngsters themselves benefit from this engagement? The expression “to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” means to experience the same things that person experiences. This is usually meant to imply that you should not judge someone based on what they are like or what they do until you have been through the same things that they have. The expression may also be a dogma when designing the development process: that a part of the journey should always include a mile or two in the users’ shoes - or at least engage the user to walk alongside with us, guiding us on the quest. This dogma requires a new awareness of the data collected about or with the target group, and how the Bikuben Foundation engages homeless youngsters in the development process. Inspired by Roger Hart (1997) a stair of user involvement has been created for the purpose of bringing awareness of what kind of user involvement must be included in order to make the process a success:

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

Designing the stairs and looking at our data, it was clear that so far the target group had been represented only by statistics and qualitative reports (Ex SFI or qualitative reports from Frederiksberg) or represented by tertiary informants such as NGOs. Despite 18 interviews carried out with research specialists and practitioners in the field and numerous reports ABOUT the homeless youngsters, a direct, involving approach, direct dialogue and engagement WITH the users had not been made. In other words, the level of engaging the user was still on the very first step of the stairs. Hence the Bikuben Foundation took the first initiative in engaging the users in the process – attending the SAND event at Folkemødet in Bornholm in June 2014, and visiting Rådmandsgade 60 (RG60) during the Autumn of 2014. Both sessions were carried out as relatively informal conversations, and both gave great insight into the challenges and needs of the target group, but analysing the actual elements of the sessions, they were worlds apart:

Where the session with SAND was somewhat censored by the staged situation and the youngsters being trained by the NGO delivering their (personal and political) messages, the sessions with RG60 offered benefits by creating an atmosphere of authenticity and trust. The first baby steps were taken, and the insights made that the further journey of Collective Impact will definitely include an aspect of authentic user engagement – further up the stairs.

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ENDING THE FIRST PART OF THE JOURNEY

That Danish foundations have done much good and with a total investment of more than 400 billion they are planting the seeds for the future is beyond all doubt. But the key question is not “do foundations do good?” but rather “do foundations do the best they possibly could in the current environment?”. Some foundations working within the paradigm of traditional or strategic philanthropy have weaknesses, in that while the world has changed and become more complex, they have remained the same. Exploiting their distinctive characteristics of freedom of market and political constraints to make a unique contribution to democratic debate, it is time for the foundations to supplement the traditional processes of change, focusing less on projects and more on the impact they want to create. To achieve an adaptive approach, the foundations have a unique position and capacity to create processes that engage all stakeholders – and also the users. Making youngsters participate in the development process of a foundation’s initiative in the field of homelessness amongst youngsters might not change everyday life here and now - for any of the youngsters involved in the first encounters between the foundation and users. But the experience of their ideas and abilities contributing to the process might strengthen the vision and belief in further involving users in designing the process of Collective Impact, from 2015 onwards. The belief has been strengthened that the youngsters’ points of view might contribute in the quest for creating better and more sustainable solutions to the problem. And in that sense an hour sitting on the couch with the two youngsters from SAND, and continuously engaging in conversations with the youngsters from RG60 are hours well invested in “walking a mile in a homeless youngster’s shoes”, to create stronger philanthropy based upon Collective Impact.

Susanne Dahl, Bikuben Foundation / Waking a mile in the shoes of a homeless youngster

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alvesson, M. (2003). Beyond neopositivists, romantics, and localists: A reflexive approach to interviews in organizational research. Academy of Management Review, 28, 13-33 Anheier, H. K. & Leat, D. (2006). Creative Philanthropy Bate. (1997). Whatever happened to organizational Antropology? A review of the field of organizational Ethnography and anthropological Studies. Human Relations 50 (9) Benjaminsen, L. & Christensen, I. ( 2007). Hjemløshed i Danmark. København: København: SFI – Det Nationale Forskningscenter for Velfærd, 07:22 Benjaminsen, L. & Lauritzen, H.H. (2013). Hjemløshed i Danmark. København: København: SFI – Det Nationale Forskningscenter for Velfærd, 13:21 Bikuben Foundation Yearbook (2013). Brown, J.S. & Duguild, P. (1991). Organizational Learning and Communities of Practise: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning and Innovation. Brown, F.H., Kania, J. & Kramer, M. (2014). Channeling Change: Making Collective Impact Work. Stanford Social Innovation Review Darsø, L. (2001). Innovation in the Making. Samfundslitteratur Frederiksberg Kommune (2012): Undersøgelse af unge hjemløse på Frederiksberg Geerdsen, L.P., Koch-Nielsen, I. Vinther, H., Christensen, I. & Christensen, V.T. (2005). Ud af hjemløshed? Om livet efter ophold på en institution for hjemløse. København: København: SFI – Det Nationale Forskningscenter for Velfærd, 05:02 Hart, R. (1997). Childrens participation: The Theory and practise of involving young citizens in community development and environmental care. London. Earthscan Publications Ltd. Kasper, G, & Marcoux, J. (2014). The Re-Emerging Art of Funding Innovation. Stanford Social Innovation Review

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Lauritzen, H.H. & Boje-Kovacs, B. (2011). Hjemløshed i Danmark. København: København: SFI – Det Nationale Forskningscenter for Velfærd, 11:45 Mandag Morgen (2011). “De innovative pengetanke” (31. oktober 2011). March, J.G. & Olsen, J.P. (1989). Rediscovering institutions: The organizational basis of politics. New York, The Free Press Mancke, H.: http://blog.effektivfilantropi.dk/author/mahncke/ Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization. Sage Publications. Nowothy, H., Scott, P. & Gibbons, M. (2001). Re-thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Polity Press Pascale, R. (2001). Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business Pasmore (2006). Action Research in the work place: The socio-technical perspective. Handbook of Action Research Bradbury & Reason, p. 45 Prahalad, C.K. & Ramaswamy, R. (2000). Co-Opting Customer Competence. Harvard Business Review Porter, M.E. & Kramer, M.R. (2011). Creating Shared Value, Harvard Business Review, January. Porter, M.E. & Kramer, M.R. (2006). Strategy and Society: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility, December Porter, M.E. & Kramer, M.R. (2002). The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy, December Porter, M.E. & Kramer, M.R. (1999). Philanthropy’s New Agenda: Creating Value, November

Susanne Dahl, Bikuben Foundation / Waking a mile in the shoes of a homeless youngster

Rittel, H.W.J & Webber, M.M. (2007). Tackling Wicked Problems – a public sector approach, Australian Public Service Commission Socialstyrelsen (2013). Mennesker der er ramt af hjemløshed – sociale indsatser der virker Stacey. R. (2007). Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics: The Challenge of Complexity to Ways of Thinking about Organisations. 5th Edition. London: Pearson Education Stacey, R. (2003). Learning as an Activity of Interdependent People. The Learning Organization, vol. 10, no. 6. Stacey, R. (2005). 29 th. S.H. Foulkes Annual Lecture: Organizational Identity: The Paradox of Continuity and Potential Transformation at the Same Time. Group Analysis, vol. 38, no. 4. Stigaard, D.L. (2011). Fra hjemløshed til egen bolig. Et interviewstudie blandt tidligere hjemløse. København: København: SFI – Det Nationale Forskningscenter for Velfærd, 11:46 Takeuchi, H. & Nonaka, I. (1986). The new product development game. Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb, p. 137-146 Van de Ven, A.H. et al (1999). The Innovation Journey. Oxford University Press. Van de Ven, A.H. (2008). The Innovation Journey. Oxford University Press http://collectiveimpactforum.org/ http://calgaryhomeless.com/

16 Tales of Innovation – methods, reflections and practice

By Anneli Bartholdy, Maersk Oil

HOW TO MATURE IDEAS IN A TECHNICAL ORGANISATION Four cases were analysed for this article. In the past, Maersk Oil staff have had mixed success maturing their ideas. Using the idea explorersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; identified successes, frustrations, and support gaps, Bartholdy proposes what the role and focus should be for a formalised idea support team in an oil and gas company.

The Author Anneli Bartholdy is Technology and Innovation Coordinator at Maersk Oil.

About the article Four cases were analysed for this article. In the past, Maersk Oil staff have had mixed success maturing their ideas. Using the idea explorersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; identified successes, frustrations, and support gaps, Bartholdy proposes what the role and focus should be for a formalised idea support team in an oil and gas company.

Maersk Oil Maersk Oil is an international oil and gas company based in Copenhagen, Denmark but with global operations. Maersk Oil is a fully-owned subsidiary of the global conglomerate, the Maersk Group. The company and wider industry is facing a period where on-going success depends on being able to support innovative thinking and effectively mature ideas into projects in a structured way.

HOW EFFECTIVELY DO PEOPLE IN TECHNOLOGY focussed organisa-

tions process their ideas from desktop to reality, and how does the organisation support this? It is often taken for granted that a good idea will succeed if it is valid.

However, as Brown and Duguid (1991) point out, there are systems and complexities at play that people are often unaware of when starting to explore an idea. “The opus operatum, the finished view, tends to see the action in terms of the task alone and cannot see the way in which the process of doing the task is actually structured by the constantly changing conditions of work and the world.” (Brown & Duguid, 1991) This article introduces an Idea Support Model for consideration when technology organisations are defining their innovation support roles. It is important to note that this model does not present a “right answer” but creates a framework for discussion. The hope is that this will result in leveraging more creativity from people and more successful technology development for the organisation.

THE MODEL AND HOW TO APPLY IT

This model represents a framework for discussion around maturing an idea. The success of the model relies entirely on early discussions and shared understanding between the idea explorer - the person or people in the organisation who originally brought the idea, or the person who has (or feels they have) responsibility for exploring and maturing the idea - and the innovation team. Every person and idea is different, so the support needs will be different from case to case, requiring a flexible approach, and should be defined up front and progressively reassessed as the idea moves forward.

Anneli Bartholdy, Maersk Oil / How to mature ideas in a technical organisation

Figure 1: Idea Support Model (Bartholdy, 2014)

GROUND LEVEL

The foundation for the support model is the concept of maturity. In this context, maturity means defining and understanding the scope, application, and goal of the idea. In order to reach maturity there needs to be a focus on: 1. Relations (the heart in the model), 2. Crystallising the scope (the diamond shape), and 3. The structure for when and how an idea becomes a project (the arrow).

1. RELATIONS

Technical complexity is often not a major stumbling block. Of the listed sub-elements, the relations between those involved in maturing the idea seemed to have the biggest impact on the ability to move it forward. In the research cases, this was easily managed by using strong networks, however, younger professionals, new staff, or dispersed organisations will not be able to rely on this and will need the support of an innovation team to help map out who to engage with, who to avoid, and

16 Tales of Innovation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; methods, reflections and practice

when to approach key decision makers. I recommend using the relational aspect of Darsø’s Diamond of Innovation. “Relations are what connect people. They can be sympathy or antipathy, understanding or lack of the same, including or excluding others, or having power, sharing power or being powerless.” (Darsø, 2007) The idea explorer and innovation team should answer these questions together: who is sympathetic to the idea (or not), who understands or needs to understand it, who will build up the idea by being included, and whether anyone should be strategically excluded. Based on the answer to these questions, an engagement plan can be structured more effectively.

2. CRYSTALLISATION

Crystallisation seems to be the area where all idea explorers could use more support. Hurdles arise when there is difficulty aligning on the specific scope of an idea. “Often words are not sufficient when new concepts are to be crystallised. One of the barriers is the degree to which certain things are taken for granted within the group… Another way of advancing conceptualisation is to use other ways of describing than words.” (Darsø, 2007) The scope of the idea needs to be crystallised through the use of a drawing or similar communication tool. Idea explorers often have a more defined understanding of the idea in their heads and may not understand why someone else does not acknowledge its potential, when it really comes down to making them see (or touch, taste, or smell) what it is about. This is not to say that crystallisation happens independently. Often a prototyping exercise or mind mapping with peers is all it takes to reach crystallisation at a level that can then be acted on by a wider group.

3. STRUCTURE

Structure means defining when an idea has become a project by documenting a process, assessment criteria and sanction point. In a technology driven organisation defining something as a project creates a level of formality and a platform for buy-in by management. The difficulty comes in determining the right time to define something as a project. Scoping ideas and failing fast is an important part of innovation, but applying heavy assessments and firm structures too soon to an early, uncrystallised idea has the potential to slow it down or stop it.

Anneli Bartholdy, Maersk Oil / How to mature ideas in a technical organisation

MOVING ON TO THE MIDDLE LEVEL OF THE MODEL

Building onto the maturity theme is the legitimacy the idea has in the organisation, the sub-elements of which are: 1. Management engagement (the magnifying glass) and 2. Politics (the hammer).

1. ENGAGEMENT

The first step in legitimacy is understanding the level of engagement the idea explorer has and wants from their manager. There are benefits and drawbacks to having an engaged manager. Some of the benefits are clear, such as helping identify potential collaborators and releasing work time, but that can backfire by collaborating too early (before crystallisation) and causing confusion and delays as people are not yet agreed on what they are working towards. Some managers may feel that being positive and giving time are enough, but in the end they do not supply the mandate to implement the idea into a sanctioned project, seeing that it may impact other work performances. An innovation team should make sure that the managers are involved early, but steer how they are involved to make sure their engagement is supported or built up but does not hinder the ideaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s success in some unintended way.

2. POLITICS

Politics refers to strategic business agendas steering the maturing of an idea. Technology organisations often engage in public and private partnerships. Innovation should support business partnerships and those partnerships should benefit maturing ideas. The risk comes in pushing technical ideas forward and engaging with partners because of the political drive from the company, and not because the idea is ready to begin collaborating on. The drive to create a partnership can overtake the need to align on the scope of the idea, causing delays and misalignment by having people working in different directions and with different motivations. The ideaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s scope and success criteria need to be agreed before collaborating too widely and the business driver cannot take precedence over the idea itself, or both may fail.

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THE UPPER LEVEL OF THE MODEL

The motivation theme is made up of three sub-elements: 1. Not taking ’no’ for an answer (the prohibition sign), 2. Ownership of the idea (the key), and 3. Reward systems (the dollar sign). The complexity of this theme arises from trying to understand why some people are willing to fight and risk a lot to push an idea ahead, while others stop or lose motivation when they face early resistance.

1. NOT TAKING ’NO’ FOR AN ANSWER

Most innovative ideas face a ’no’ at some point and the innovation team needs to try and understand up front whether the idea explorer is someone who will stop there or not take no for an answer, move on and keep trying regardless, to be able to know what their level of support should be in intercepting or responding to ’no’s. It is also important to appreciate that some idea explorers are motivated by being told no, or that something is impossible, so too much support from a team can have the opposite effect. This is why up front dialogue with the idea explorer is so important.

2. OWNERSHIP

This leads to the theme of ownership. The innovation team needs to understand whether this person is someone who does not care who works on the idea, as long as it moves ahead, or someone who thinks of their idea as their ’baby’ and will be demotivated if it gets moved to someone else. Taking away someone’s ’baby’ can result in them not working with the innovation team in the future because they no longer trust that their idea will not be given away. Alternatively, if they are an ideator who comes with many ideas but feels little commitment to working on them, they will likely prefer ownership be given to someone else because they may not have time to work on them all themselves. This produces a risk that some may not move ahead that could be worthwhile.

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3. REWARD

The last sub-element is reward. None of the people interviewed during the research to create this model felt monetary reward would motivate them or their colleagues. The best reward, they said, was to have their idea used and acknowledged by their peers. This is consistent with what is seen in much of innovation management literature. (Buljubasic, 2013) This means that the innovation team should have: 1) communication media available where the organisation can be informed of the on-going activities and results, and be introduced to people who are actively working technology projects, and 2) implementation and marketing plans to put successful project outcomes to use.

HOW TO USE THE MODEL

Summarising what has been proposed here, the innovation team’s role is to facilitate the people and processes involved in maturing ideas, to create legitimacy, and to sustain motivation in technical organisations, more specifically larger organisations. “As long as the organization is small, there is no need for a formal idea-handling procedure. But as it grows and the number of people and ideas becomes large, even in an idea-stimulating culture and climate… a more formal procedure seems required to take care of the creative potential of the employees.” (Ekvall, 1991) In the end it is my hope that this model will be useful to creative and motivated employees who want to drive their organisations’ future success through innovation, and to companies who want to be structured to support those employees effectively. The research used to formulate the Idea Support Model was based on interviews at Maersk Oil and Gas, a mid-sized exploration and production company headquartered in Denmark. Despite this scope, I believe the learning and proposals are equally relevant for any mid to large organisation with a technology development focus. As a result of the research, Maersk Oil is considering the model and its themes for implementation as part of their technology and innovation process.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartholdy, A. (2014): A Model of Support for Idea Exploration in E&P. Unpublished Masters Dissertation, Aarhus University/Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark. Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (1991): ‘Organizational Learning and Communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation’. Organization Science, 40-57. Buljubasic, T. (2013): ‘Rewarding Innovation’ [blog post]. http://www.innovationexcellence. com/blog/2013/08/04/rewarding-innovation-2/ [accessed 15th September 2014] Darsø, L. (2007): ‘Is There a Formula for Innovation?’ (translated). Børsen Ledelseshåndbøger, 55-68. Ekvall, G. (1991): ‘The Organizational Culture of Idea-Management: A Creative Climate for the Management of Ideas’. I J. Henry, & D. Walker, Managing Innovation (73-79). London: Sage Publications.

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By Michael Meyer, Municipality of RĂ¸dovre

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A NEW ASSESSMENT FORM The case study is based on the hiring of an external consultancy company, their screening of case work and a subsequent development process. The external consultancy company developed forms to be used by the case workers. The process was evaluated as a success by the steering committee from a canonical perspective, but when the process was considered from a non-canonical perspective, aspects of these forms were a failure and did not make sense to most of the case workers.

The Author Michael Meyer is Team Manager of Case Workers in the Department of Child Welfare, Rødovre Municipality, Denmark, where he carried out the research for this case study.

About the article The case study is based on the hiring of an external consultancy company, their screening of case work and a subsequent development process. The external consultancy company developed forms to be used by the case workers. The process was evaluated as a success by the steering committee from a canonical perspective, but when the process was considered from a non-canonical perspective, aspects of these forms were a failure and did not make sense to most of the case workers. Rødovre Municipality The Municipality of Rødovre has approx. 3300 employees catering for the 37.600 citizens of Rødovre. The city is located west of Copenhagen.

THE DEPARTMENT OF CHILD WELFARE IN RØDOVRE had been unable to keep their expenditure within the politically allotted budgets for several years. As a result, an external consultant was hired to work with the Department of Child Welfare at the beginning of 2011. After an initial screening of 250 cases it was decided to implement an assessment form to ensure administrative quality and a coherent relation between complexity and cost in each case. The external consultant presented a draft and invited input from the case workers for the assessment form in a few workshops. The final form was presented to the case workers by the external consultant and the project committee decided on the use of the assessment form in May 2012. But the case workers really struggled to implement the use of the assessment into their work routines. The article is about a newly employed manager who experienced resistance amongst the case workers to the introduction of new ideas. The manager went undercover as a researcher to journey back in time to probe the stories of the past that haunted the department. Before my present employment as a Team Manager I had functioned as a consultant in different organisations. I learned the hard way to be aware of the stories of the past that are layered in the collective memory of any organisation and shape their response to new ideas. I knew from my own experience what an old history teacher of mine often quoted in his lessons to be true: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (Santayana: The Life of Reason, 1905). I was expected to bring change, but I quickly sensed that the case workers were resistant, maybe even allergic to new ideas. But I was hesitant to ask about the stories of the past because I did not want to come across a fault-finding, superior and arrogant punk. So I decided to use my Master’s project to study a process that had run the previous two years, where an external consultant had been hired to introduce specific assessment forms into the practice of the case workers. In a way I went undercover as a researcher who could ask probing questions about the stories of the past connected to this process with the external consultant. As a newly hired manager, my access to the stories of the past was restricted to front stage knowledge, which is publicly-known explicit action and speech. As a researcher I could ask probing questions into back stage knowledge, that is the unsaid implicit sentiments and shared understandings that influence action and speech (KrauseJensen 2010 p. 31, Turner 1974 p. 133). I journeyed back to the stories from the past

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to discover what the case workers remembered about the introduction of new ideas that had made them seemingly so averse to change. To study how the process with the external consultant influenced the work done by the case workers, I found a helpful distinction in an article from 1991 by Brown and Duguid entitled “Organizational Learning and Communities-of-practice.” Here they describe the organisational gap between formal work descriptions, referred to as canonical practice, and how the actual work is conducted, referred to as non-canonical practice (Brown & Duguid, 1991). To explain, they compare canonical practice to a road map and non-canonical practice to the actual journey, and state the following: “Many organizations are willing to assume that complex tasks can be successfully mapped onto a set of simple, Tayloristic, canonical steps that can be followed without need of significant understanding or insight… .” (Brown & Duguid 1991 p. 42) Canonical practice and non-canonical practice co-exist in every organisation and both need attention. You need the road map to know where you are going, but without performing the actual journey the map is worthless. “It is the actual practices … that determine the success or failure of organizations.” (Brown & Duguid 1991 p. 41) I will now elaborate on how I applied this distinction to the process with the external consultant in my Master’s project. I understood the use of the forms by the case workers in my study as an example of a canonical practice. The external consultant invited input from the case workers during several workshops on the process. I found it helpful to distinguish between two different ways canonical practice is produced. At times canonical practice is produced descriptively, in attempts to capture snapshots of how actual work is done, or prescriptively in attempts to direct how work should be done. From the viewpoint of the external consultant, the use of the forms was seen as what I term descriptive canonical practice since it has used the input of the case workers. But the case workers commented in the interviews that they understood the use of the forms as prescriptive canonical practice that really had very little to do with their non-canonical practice, and therefore made no sense to them. The case workers are employed in a public service institution, and like other public organisations it is created for “doing good” (Drucker 1995 p. 163-164 and Bason 2010 p. 228). Our public service institution is created to help children and their families, and the non-canonical practice of the case workers is aimed at this “doing good”. In the interviews, the case workers clearly stated that it was important to

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them to connect the use of the forms to helping children and their families. They felt the use of the forms “stole” work time that otherwise could be used to help children and their families. When I embarked on my journey to study the stories of the past connected to the process with the external consultant, I viewed the lack of use of the forms as opposition from the case workers, simply because it required some new work routines. But through my study I came to understand their lack of use of the forms as an expression of loyalty to the “doing good” of their public institution and the non-canonical practice that had evolved to achieve that aim. What I discovered through my study was the importance as a manager of ‘minding the gap’ between non-canonical and canonical practice. Too often my focus was on presenting and explaining canonical practice in convincing and engaging ways. It is necessary to put any new practice in context with the existing non-canonical practice that is a meaningful way of “doing good”. Etienne Wenger calls it ‘brokering’, in his book “Communities of Practice”, when an element of one practice gets transferred to another practice (Wenger 1998 p. 109). He understands leadership in terms of transferring elements between practices and states the following: “The role of managers is often construed in terms of directing people, but it is worth noting that a good part of their activities have more to do with brokering across boundaries between practices.” (Wenger 1998 p. 109) A manager can mind the gap by brokering, which is a constant communicative challenge of sense-making between the non-canonical practice and canonical practices.

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As a manager I am constantly brokering when I address the non-canonical practice of the case workers in relation to a canonical practice. It can be prescriptive canonical practice, such as new legislature regarding our work field that dictates that work should be done in a certain manner, or descriptive canonical practice, as when I produce a manual based on how I perceive some work routines are normally done. To aid my brokering, I developed a model through my study process where I included the context of newness and value in relation to the content of brokering between canonical and non-canonical practice. Both newness and added value are the pre-eminent components of innovation, so these two aspects help me to explain to case workers and other stakeholders what is to be gained from adopting a canonical practice into the ongoing non-canonical practice. So instead of presenting a canonical practice as the way to get work done then innovation brokering would consider its newness and value in relation to the already existing non-canonical practice. Because any canonical practice needs to be adopted into the non-canonical practice to have any effect on the actual work being done by the case workers, I think it is important to keep in mind that value is a fairly relative term, especially in the public sector. The estimate of value might vary between case worker, child, the parents, management, politicians and their appointers the general public. I believe my journey back to the stories of the past as a researcher taught me how to be a better manager to the case workers in the future. Firstly, I gained an appreciation of their genuine commitment to the â&#x20AC;&#x153;doing goodâ&#x20AC;? which our public institution was created to produce. Secondly, I learnt to accept that canonical practices should make sense to be incorporated into non-canonical practice. And my contribution was to mind the gap and to broker between the practices. Thirdly, starting out as both manager and researcher in the department taught me how important it is to be clear about my position and why and for what use I ask employees certain questions. Finally, I hope my study of the process with the external consultant taught me enough about that specific story of the past so that I am not condemned to repeat it.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bason, Christian. (2010) Leading public sector innovation. The Policy Press, Bristol, United Kingdom Drucker, Peter F. (1995) Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford. Krause-Jensen, J. (2010) Flexible Firm. The Design of Culture at Bang & Olufsen. Oxford; New York: Berghahn Books. Turner, Victor (1974) Dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Van de Ven, A. H., Polley, D. E., Garud, R & Venkataraman, S. (2008) The Innovation Journey. Oxford University Press, New York. Wenger, Etienne (1998) Communities of Practice. Cambridge University Press, New York.

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By Ingelise Schmidt, Maersk Oil

A LOOSE HAND ON THE TILLER: INNOVATION LEADERSHIP IN SPECIALIST TEAMS Based on interviews with leaders and team members it is established that particular leadership mind-set and behaviors are vital for successfully fostering innovation in specialist teams: Leaders must focus on people traits and competencies and strong facilitation skills are imperative to utilize the diverse skills of the specialists. Also innovation leaders must welcome challenge, uncertainty and failure as this is crucial for innovation.

The Author Ingelise Schmidt leads a team of multidisciplinary subsurface specialists in Maersk Oil Her research interests focus on leadership and innovation in specialist teams.

About the article Based on interviews with leaders and team members it is established that particular leadership mind-set and behaviors are vital for successfully fostering innovation in specialist teams: Leaders must focus on people traits and competencies and strong facilitation skills are imperative to utilize the diverse skills of the specialists. Also innovation leaders must welcome challenge, uncertainty and failure as this is crucial for innovation. Maersk Oil Maersk Oil is an international oil and gas company based in Copenhagen, Denmark but with global operations. Maersk Oil is a fully-owned subsidiary of the global conglomerate, the Maersk Group.

THE OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY IS, LIKE MANY industries, dependent on

continuous innovation to address growing challenges in a complex world. Innovation has to be nourished and promoted, and above all, innovation requires creative and knowledgeable people who can foster new ideas and develop these ideas into useful innovations. Since innovation rarely, if ever, is the result of one man’s doing (Hill et. al., 2010), people are often brought together in teams to work with challenges and to make these teams excel, hence good leadership is paramount. At Maersk Oil, it is the general rule that people work together in multi-disciplinary specialist teams of different kinds to solve various tasks, and innovation is in many cases an integral part of what they do. What makes a great innovation leader under these circumstances?

“WHY NOT” INSTEAD OF “WHY”

My case builds on interviews with eight leaders and seven team members from specialist teams, where questions were posed around innovation in teams and what is required to be a successful innovation leader. Each interview was taped and lasted between 30 and 60 minutes. From this extensive material, stories of leaders empowering and trusting team members to do what is needed to solve problems or pursue new ideas emerged, indicating constructive innovation leadership in the organisation. Examining these examples, the main leadership themes were: setting the right team, activating the resulting diversity and facilitating collaboration between team members and wider multi-disciplinary communities. Some leaders were intentionally seeking out people with special skills to populate their team. These people are often not easy-going types, but people who care so much about their specialism that they happily enter into disputes. Such team constructs pose significant challenges to leaders, who will have to facilitate collaboration, constructively handle disagreements and become the ‘glue’ that holds the team together. Throughout interviews, critical innovation leadership capabilities were proposed, such as: trust, empowerment, being able to embrace new ideas by saying ‘why not’ instead of just ‘why’. Both leaders and team members stressed that the leader

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should have a strong technical background to be able to manage knowledgeable specialists, but at the same time the leader needs not to get ‘bogged down’ into their own specialism, but to give room to everybody, to step down and let others take over specialist responsibility. Also, the leader should be able to create the space for people to contribute with their own specialism, and facilitate the collaboration with the ‘outside world’. Part of being an innovation leader is also accepting uncertainty and ambiguity, and all interviewees stressed that the leader has to acknowledge that innovation does include failure and walking down ‘blind alleys’.

THE EXPERT LEADER

The expert leader is very common, if not dominant, in knowledge organisations and is central for the specialist teams in this study. All the leaders interviewed for this study are very experienced experts who have advanced into leadership positions. In Darsø (2001 & 2011) the author discusses the role of the expert in the context of the diamond of innovation. The expert or specialist leader can fall into the trap of operating only on the concepts-knowledge axis in the diamond of innovation and hence the group might never explore and experience the other dimensions needed for innovation (Figure 1).

Figure 1 The diamond of innovation (Darsø, 2001)

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The expert leader may in this situation have chosen the specialisation strategy, being the only contributor with new ideas. The team becomes dependent on a strong creative leader and his ability to win support for the ideas (Stacey, 1996 & Darsø, 2001). An expert leader can then act as a barrier to innovation, as the knowledge might never be questioned, due to the hierarchical construct. In general, expertise can act as a barrier as there is a common tendency to trust statements from specialists and experts, who like everybody else can communicate statements on very little foundation, without being aware of this due to mental programming. (Hansen, 1998 & Darsø, 2011) Hemlin (2009) has conducted a comprehensive interview study with members of what he calls Creative Knowledge Environments (CKE’s). The working environment and the specialist team construction in Maersk Oil are comparable with these CKE’s. Hemlin concludes that the team members in his study have a very strong focus on creative leadership, and that leaders should be knowledgeable about the technical environments they are leading in.

FACILITATIVE LEADERSHIP

Facilitative leadership is an ideal tool for leading in a complex and changing world, and hence interesting in the context of the specialist teams at Maersk Oil: “The aim of the facilitative leader is to create organizations that are participative, responsive and essentially self-managing, exactly the kind of workplace in which knowledge workers thrive.” (Bens, 2005) Empowerment is an inherent part of facilitating leadership, although in general it has suffered a rather bad reputation. This has happened as the term has been extensively used without any real action behind it. If you do not ‘walk the talk’, people very quickly become cynical and lose trust, and what began with good intentions has a poor result. Empowerment used and executed in an appropriate way will facilitate innovation and progress. (Bens, 2005)

DIVERSITY

To manage diversity based on differences in discipline and knowledge, there have to be skills amongst the team members to build bridges. This can be envisaged in the form of a leader that knows enough about almost everything, with-

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out being an expert in any topic in particular. A special term is introduced by Justesen (2008), where she offers Nexialism as a way to manage innovation in an environment where diversity is high. Nexialism is defined as “Someone skilled in the science of joining together in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields” (Van Vogt, in Justesen 2008, page 2). The Nexialist provides the glue that is needed for connecting language and understanding from different fields into a common understanding from where new knowledge can grow. Justesen (2008) proposes that most studies indicate that diverse groups are more innovative than homogeneous groups, and hence diversity is seen as a good thing for innovation. However diversity can also create conflict, and this might be damaging for innovation (Denti 2011). Justesen also explains that you might have the necessary diverse knowledge available, but you also need to bring it into play, and that this does not necessarily happen without some kind of mediation.

LEADING INNOVATION

Leading innovation in a highly specialised matrix organisation is quite challenging; it is not enough to be a good facilitating leader, you will also need a technical foundation and the ability to navigate a complex environment. Where managers in the past were primarily factional leaders, in areas they knew well, today they often lead a diverse group of specialists, covering areas very different from their own specialism. (Bens 2005) Hill et. al. (2010, page 3) propose a way to lead based on a comprehensive study of leaders in organisations that have produced breakthrough innovations more than once. They propose in conclusion the following: •

Innovation is about co-design: creative abrasion, creative agility, and integrative problem-solving. Co-design is collaborative work that entails the exacting leadership task of unleashing and harnessing the diverse “slices of genius”™ (talents) in an organisation for a collective good.

•

The art of leadership for innovation is about (1) creating a world to which people want to belong - one in which individuals are affirmed in their identity (unleashing their slices of genius and values) and able to be a part of

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and contribute to something larger than themselves (harnessing the diverse slices of genius to develop innovative solutions for a collective purpose) and (2) developing the individual and collective capacity for co-design. •

Leadership for innovation is more about leading from behind than leading from the front. It is about shaping individual and collective experiences to foster innovation rather than about setting direction and mobilizing people to follow.

The concept of leading from behind is illustrated like this: “A leader . . . is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.” (Mandela, 1995, in Hill et. al., 2010, page 25) Leading from behind features many of the same leadership behaviours as facilitating leadership, but there are differences: one of them is that these leaders see the extraordinary where others see the ordinary, and they are convinced that everyone has a slice of genius that can be brought into play with the right kind of leadership. Importantly, innovation leaders have a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty and are fundamentally comfortable sharing power.

THE INNOVATION LEADER IN SPECIALIST TEAMS

The leadership type dominating at Maersk Oil is the expert leader. To avoid falling into the trap of micromanaging their teams, these leaders have to go through a development process to become good innovation leaders. They have to let go of their original expertise, embrace facilitative leadership and aspire to become Nexialists. (Darsø 2011, Bens 2006, Justesen 2008 & Figure 2)

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Figure 2, Innovation leadership: The innovation leader has to develop from team specialist (a) to expert (b) first. Then as leader, build knowledge from other disciplines (c, d) and finally very importantly let go of own expertise (e).

Some leaders at Maersk Oil are able to create a world where people want to belong. They lead diverse innovative teams effectively and exploit diversity using facilitation skills and concepts like leading from behind. The empirical data also demonstrate that these leaders are very aware of what it actually takes to lead innovation in terms of creating the right team, making sure that all the skills in the teams come into play, and they behave like innovation leaders, welcoming challenge, uncertainty and failures. (Hill et. al. 2008) The most successful innovation leaders behave like the shepherd: they watch and interact with the team as changes in direction and discussion occur. Navigating complexity, they comfortably let others take the lead and support everyone in the team to contribute with their â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;slice of geniusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. They create a trusting and yet challenging environment where the team can excel together.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bens, I. (2006): “Facilitating to lead! Leadership strategies for a networked world”. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Darsø, L. (2001): “Innovation in the Making”, Samfundslitteratur Frederiksberg Darsø, L. (2011): Innovationspædagogik, Samfundslitteratur Denti, L (2011): Leadership and Innovation: How and When do Leaders Influence Innovation in R&D Teams? Degree of licentiate in Psychology, Gothenburg Research Institute, University of Gothenburg. Hemlin, Sven. (2009). Creative Knowledge Environments: An Interview Study with Group Members and Group Leaders of University and Industry R&D Groups in Biotechnology. Hansen, M. (1998): Intelligens og Tænkning – en bog om kognitiv psykologi (2. Udg.). Horsens: Åløkke A/S. Hill, Linda A; Travaglini, Maurizio; Brandeau, Greg and Strecker, Emily (2010) In Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, Chapter 21: Unlocking the Slices of Genius in Your Organization. Justesen, S. (2008). Innovation Management as Nexialism. Innoversity Working Paper 2008 #1. Copenhagen: Innoversity Research Copenhagen www.innoversity.org Stacey, Ralph D. (1996): Complexity and Creativity in Organizations, Berret-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco Van Vogt, A.E (1951); “The voyage of the space Beagle”, Grayson & Grayson, London

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By Mikala Holme SamsĂ¸e, Henning Larsen Architects

STRATEGIC PHYSICAL PLANNING? YES PLEASE, BUT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THE SAME THING? The article is based on a case study carried out at the Danish University and Building Agency in 2010. The Agency wanted to initiate campus planning that took both the physical and the political strategic aspects of universities into consideration.

The Author Mikala Holme SamsĂ¸e is Development Manager and Architect at Henning Larsen Architects in Munich

About the article The article is based on a case study carried out at the Danish University and Building Agency in 2010. The Agency wanted to initiate campus planning that took both the physical and the political strategic aspects of universities into consideration.

Danish University and Building Agency Now instead named: The Danish Building & Property Agency is a large Danish public building owner of university facilities, who build, rent, facilitate and develop university buildings. It has a total building portfolio of approximately 4 million square meters. Until 2011, the Agency ran under the auspices of the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, which handles tasks related to policies for universities.

THE DANISH UNIVERSITY AND BUILDING AGENCY wished to initiate stra-

tegic physical campus planning at Danish universities and university leaders had shown interest in this too. Nevertheless, it was not really happening. What are the barriers for initiating physical campus planning processes at Danish universities, and what can support such processes in the future? I address some general problems in working with strategic physical planning: wanting to make strategic choices for the long-term view, when at the same time everyday issues are present and result in ad hoc decisions and incoherent solutions. Strategic physical campus planning today is no longer only about the architectural and social aspects of a university, but also about communication, organisational understanding, branding, funding and politics. Complexity grows. The time scale has gone from a 15-20 year perspective to 4-6 years, and the number of actors involved in the planning processes has exploded. My colleagues and I were questioning how we initiate and orchestrate strategic physical campus processes under these changing circumstances. While writing my thesis I wanted to focus on the implementation of physical planning processes because this at first sight seemed to be the problem. However, in the process of writing I learned that we were not all talking about the same thing when talking about strategic campus planning. I had to take a step back and consider how the people I collaborate with understand the phenomenon.

CONSTRUCTING REALITY

I have experienced university leaders speaking of the importance of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;goodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; buildings for a university. On the other hand I visit Danish universities and wonder why the buildings and the space between them are designed with what seems to be little thought of the activities that could take place there. From my point of view, constructing or renovating, although it costs a lot of money, seldom seems to be combined with the strategic decisions of the universities. My colleagues and I - I was an architect at the Agency in charge of public university buildings in Denmark - saw huge potential in initiating physical campus planning processes to develop the Danish universities strategically, meaning using a physical framework to fulfil the political and strategic goals of a university. And

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many people at the universities apparently believed that too, when I queried it. Nevertheless it did not really seem to happen. Were we speaking of the same thing when we talked about campus and buildings? I am inspired by a social constructionist idea of reality (Davies & Harré, 1990), (Foucault, 1982), (Staunæs, 2003) meaning something constructed and not objective. I believe this perspective can help shed light on how positions and language create discourses and power plays that influence the possibilities for, in this case, doing strategic physical campus planning. I think it can help me gain a theoretical understanding of the differences of perception of the phenomenon that might create barriers in my daily practical work. I am also intrigued by the complex relational thinking that suggests that strategic planning is not possible at all. The idea is that a plan for the future is never carried out the way it is planned. In my view it offers a refreshing alternative to the current cybernetic thinking of planning for a distant future, which is what my colleagues and I try to do at work.

METHODS USED

I started out being descriptive and explored different understandings of strategic campus planning in Denmark in order to identify barriers. I started by looking at how universities, who are crucial actors in this discussion, think of the concept of ‘strategic physical campus planning’. My hypothesis was that this understanding is crucial for me and my colleagues’ ability to act and support future campus processes, because otherwise I will act and initiate campus planning based on incomplete information. I made explorative interviews with four university leaders who are all engaged in the overall strategic decisions related to the university - a dean, two vice chancellors and a university director, which established my empirical foundation. Secondly, I took a look at my findings through the branches of social constructionism that deal with power, subject positions and intersectionality (Davies & Harré, 1990), (Foucault, 1982) in order to look for barriers. The concept of power deals with the dynamics that enable and disable relationships between people, and since my case involves public and politically driven institutions, it is most likely that power-plays have an influence.

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Finally, I turned to the normative part to suggest possible new ways to support future planning processes. Here I used the concept of complex responsive processes (Stacey, 2007). This concept is interesting because it focuses on the present and the emerging patterning of people’s interaction instead of idealised plans for the future. This could challenge the barriers related to the long-term view and the whole idea of doing strategic campus planning. I also used the concept of model making in order to discuss what can be done to support campus planning processes. The concept of model making can be described as having a design attitude to problem solving. The idea is that physical models and prototypes enlarge the space for communication and help keep the conversation open and explorative. Campus planning, though involving architects, often takes place in a context where the spoken and written word counts. People in my organisation and the universities mainly use words to communicate, propose and decide. It is also interesting to see what happens if physical materiality becomes the medium for communication.

LESSONS LEARNED – PLANNING STARTS TODAY

This Master’s thesis turned out rather differently than I thought it would. I ended up working with theories that I did not plan or expect to. When I started I was not aware of how little I knew of what leaders at universities think of campus planning until I had conducted interviews with four university leaders. One small example: I recorded and transcribed the interviews and it was a transforming process in the sense that I analysed the interview while transcribing it. I learned several things from this. During the interview I was surprised and happy to hear how much the four leaders spoke about different aspects, including physical, of the changes in campus planning. But when I transcribed the interviews I realised that several times I had been listening to statements about organisational or educational challenges and simultaneously translating what they said into challenges for architecture and planning. For example, one leader explained how the university did not want to create competition between their campuses, and I remember I found it interesting that they wanted to create campus areas that physically looked different. While transcribing I realised that the leader said absolutely nothing about the physical aspect but only

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referred to organisational differences. I now wonder how often I have made this mistake when talking to university leaders about physical planning. Seen from a social constructionist point of view, the mere understanding of the barriers and the disturbing effect power-plays and positioning have, will have a positive, supporting effect on my ability to enable and initiate planning processes. The normative analysis of the barriers showed possible ways to support strategic campus planning in the future. One of the possible ways to provide support is to shift focus from creating an idealised strategic future vision to questioning the present activities instead. The word ‘strategic’ is interesting here, as seen from a complex responsive perspective. The discourse of campus planning that my colleagues and I were working in suggests that physical planning can create strategic change. ‘Strategic’ indicates a greater whole and the discourse of my organisation privileges the abstract and idealised view that universities should become ‘vivid world class places that interact with society’. Furthermore, in the planning sector it is common practice to envision a final picture of how we want something to be: architectural visualisations of lively campus environments inhabited by happy people is an example of this practice. The common assumption of people, including myself, in the planning sector is that a final picture provides everyone, staff, students, city, and authorities or sponsors a common goal that everyone can use as a point of departure. However, what would happen to campus planning processes if we started in the present instead of in the future? The importance of strategic choices is a dominant discourse today, and it would be rather unusual to say: “We do not quite know where we are going, but we will tell others about our intention and see what happens”. Using this theoretical approach led to possible ways to support campus planning. One finding was that my colleagues and I - along with the leaders from the university - could start asking ourselves: “What can we do today in order to live out the intention of ‘doing something’ at our campus? What is the next conversation we need to have – and with whom?”

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STARTING MEANINGFUL CONVERSATIONS

It is relevant to speak with â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the usual onesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, as one of the vice chancellors said in the interview about the people they involve in campus planning. But there might be others as well, both at the top as well as at the bottom. A limitation is that this thinking strategy is so remote from the dominant discourse of western thinking (Stacey, 2007). Complex responsive thinkers would probably say that the limitations I mention are all products of this discourse. One lesson I take with me from the complex responsive perspective is that it is not possible for me to control the way people inside or outside my organisation think about and initiate campus planning. Instead, it has been beneficial to me and to my organisation that I could contribute to change by using my new understanding and theoretical knowledge to influence and engage myself in campus model making and in meaningful conversations about campus planning. This promotes collaboration with my colleagues, people from the universities, municipalities, the business sector and people living, working and studying at campus, as well as all the people I do not even know yet.

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Figure 1: Two different approaches to initiating CP, A) a campus process where a limited number of people are structuring and working towards a defined goal (e.g. a visionary plan) in order to start implementation according to the plan afterwards; B) shows a process where a larger number of actors are involved early and they create pattern making that could change the campus, thus â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;implementationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; starts at the very moment people start doing things differently. (Illustration by author)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davies B & Harré R (1990): Positioning: the Discursive Production of Selves. In: Davis, B (2000) A body of writing 1990-1999. Walnut Creek: Chapter 6 Foucault, M (1982) The subject and power, in: Dreyfus, H & Rabinow, P (eds): Michel Foucault; Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton Stacey, R. (2007) Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics, the challenge of complexity to ways of thinking about organisations, Prentice Hall Staunæs, D (2003) Where have all the subjects gone? Bringing together the concepts of intersectionality and subjectification. NORA no 2, Vol 11

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By Peter Dexters, Danish Prison and Probation Service

SOCIAL INNOVATION IN PRISONS: MAKING CROOKS AND COOKS MATTER The article describes the process of initiating and disseminating user-involvement in the Danish Prisons and Probation Service, and discusses why in social innovation efforts it might be fruitful to regard development processes and dissemination as integrated. The findings are based on a case study including interviews with inmates, staff and managers as well as written and personal accounts.

The Author Peter Dexters is Project Manager at the Danish Prison and Probation Service. His work promotes social innovation in the prison system.

About the article The article describes the process of initiating and disseminating user-involvement in the Danish Prisons and Probation Service, and discusses why in social innovation efforts it might be fruitful to regard development processes and dissemination as integrated. The findings are based on a case study including interviews with inmates, staff and managers as well as written and personal accounts.

The Danish Prison and Probation Service The main purpose of prison and probation work is to contribute to reducing criminality. The vision of the Danish Prison and Probation Service is â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bringing people safely to a life free of crimeâ&#x20AC;?. The Prison and Probation Service has activities (state prisons, local prisons, probation offices) at almost 80 locations all over Denmark, including at 18 locations in Greenland and on the Faroe Islands.

IN 2007 I PROPOSED THAT WE ATTEMPT TO APPLY the method of

user-driven innovation in the prisons to try another approach at improving conditions for staff as well as inmates. The proposal was received well, although with some puzzled minds as both “user” and “innovation” were new concepts in a prison setting. I believe a necessary condition for starting was that we were addressing current problems of bad relations (threats, harassment etc.) between staff and inmates. The term user-involvement does not denote one single approach in the Prison Service but rather a variety of approaches that have built upon and inspired each other. Thus the first strategic efforts of user-involvement were labelled “user-driven-innovation” and were mainly focused on whether inmates and local staff and management together could develop good solutions to improve the quality of everyday life for inmates as well as employees (Kriminalforsorgen, Cowi, Via Design: 2009). So it may be argued that these first efforts lay within the approach of Participatory Design where users take the roles not just as critics and evaluators of products and systems concepts, but as co-designers (Buur, J. & Bødker, S: 2008). Later efforts range from user-surveys to educational courses highlighting the importance of cooperation in the Prison and Probation System. In the context of prisons and in the social field in general I believe that methods that engage end users i.e. the inmates, have a dual potential. Firstly we may achieve greater understanding of the clients’ needs - but perhaps more importantly we are inviting the inmates to engage i.e. socialise with us (staff). Without taking this point further I would suggest that socialising isn’t the least interesting thing we can do in an organisation with a main goal of re-socialisation.

YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND

When I initiated the first user-involvement project in the Prison and Probation Service in 2008, the Steering Committee was asked if they had any particular wishes for the project. The leader of the Prison Officers Union exclaimed“Throughout the years there have been many good projects in the prison service, but we do not have a good record of disseminating projects and giving them life after the project phase”. So he wished that we would somehow find a way to spread the results. As part of the user-involvement project it was agreed with management that since our organisation is a solid top-down model, we could benefit from experimenting

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with seeing the organisation as more bottom-up – not just in regards to the local innovation projects but also in regards to dissemination. In this process these two rules of thumb which support each other developed: 1. Always try to live out in practice what you are talking about in theory. This has to a large degree to do with the need to be authentic by walking the talk. When introducing user-involvement, especially in prisons, you must be aware that you are messing with the existing roles. So if you expect prison officers and inmates to experiment with their roles you should be willing to do so too. 2. Do not try to spread new learning and practices through supplying reports, Internet pages, databases etc. - rather have people meet face to face and create the demand for learning. Research studies show that face to face meetings command the highest success rates for disseminating innovations between organisations - as many as 73 % implement something inspired from the other organisation’s innovation (Torfing 2014). As the main “theoretical” point being made was that it is important to involve the “users” i.e. inmates and prison officers in local development efforts, I tried forcing this point also upon my own tasks as a project manager and facilitator. This meant inviting inmates and officers from the projects to take the role of facilitators at workshops and speakers at presentations. This created the opportunity for people in the organisation to meet and talk face to face with the people actually involved in the projects, and at the same time it offered inmates and officers a chance to take ownership of the projects.

MESSING WITH THE WORLD OF “US AND THEM”

In 2008 formal user involvement was restricted to inmates’ spokesmen elected by fellow inmates who would have meetings with management every one or two months. Suggesting a user-survey or having inmates participate in workshops would at best result in raised eyebrows and the statement: “...you do realize this is not a hotel..?”. It is important however to introduce inmates as co-creators of safety and rehabilitation. Prisons tend to create “Us-Them” dichotomies between inmates and staff. This puts safety and rehabilitation efforts at risk, because if inmates keep their

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distance from staff (and vice versa), then the staff ’s ability to prevent threats and violence between inmates and to create relations of mutual respect, where the other is not dehumanised to a degree where violence becomes legitimate, is impaired greatly. An inmate explains the difference between cooperation and non-cooperation as he witnessed it through the user-involvement project : “...I almost feel we are equals. Before you were almost considered a snitch by the other inmates if you spoke with an officer. I think we can help each other...” (Cowi 2009). Rehabilitation efforts are of course also impeded if people are not talking together. A prison officer puts it this way: “I’ve always thought it was strange to speak of rehabilitation when the doors were closed”. User-involvement in the Danish Prison Service has undergone a development since it was first initiated. The first two centrally initiated projects were named “User-driven innovation” and took place from 2008-2009 in two prisons. They involved mainly inmates, prison officers, social helpers and managers meeting in development groups over the course of approximately half a year. The groups met about 8 times and were facilitated by myself as an in-house consultant as well as by outside consultants. The consultants’ main tasks were to facilitate conversations, trying to find ways to overcome initial hostility and guiding the conversations in the direction of exploring what could improve life in prison for all groups. This encompassed many facilitating techniques, among others, depicting life in prisons through collages, becoming aware of roles through inmates dramatising officers’ work and vice versa, switching between work in groups and in pairs to either utilise group dynamics or avoid group pressure at various points. It is not possible to establish clear causalities in these projects, but quantitative surveys as well as interviews with inmates, prison officers and management ascribed positive changes to the projects in regards to solving conflicts and meeting each other with respect. In the words of a prison governor: “The project has created a sense of professional closeness. Inmate attitudes that it was wrong to talk to prison officers have softened. We’re headed down the right path.” (Feature 2009: 15)

DISSEMINATING WITH THE USERS

It was suggested that early findings should be presented at a meeting for top leadership and that the report should be distributed widely. However this was declined as it would be the “usual” way of disseminating. Instead, on two occasions we had

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inmates and staff present the project for very broad sections of the organisation (from frontline staff to middle and top management). This meant that user-involvement was still being lived out as the users were being involved in the presentation and dissemination (first rule of thumb) and that we were talking face to face (second rule of thumb). So we did not push a user-involvement concept upon people. One concrete outcome was that a middle manager from another prison became interested, but instead of offering him a copy of the report I invited him to take part in interviewing inmates and officers involved in the initial project. He became very engaged, especially by meeting the inmates face to face, and we afterwards decided to apply for funding of a new project in his prison. But dissemination of user-involvement also happened without my direct interference. Immediately following the user-driven innovation projects the largest prison in Denmark, Copenhagen Prison, started a project about improving the “common environment” between inmates and staff, which has now been formalised (Rørdam 2014), and they also became first movers in making user-surveys. Afterwards I was told that staff from the Copenhagen Prison had visited participants in the user-driven innovation projects to get inspiration.

FROM USER-DRIVEN INNOVATION TO BROADER CO-CREATION

Another important learning from the first projects has been that staff and management often mirror the same oppositional “Us-Them” dichotomies as do inmates and staff, and the same goes for the relationship between institutions and the Department - as well as between the Prison and Probation Service and the outside world. This has resulted in rethinking user-involvement. Together with the school responsible for educating prison officers I am now creating an educational course for change leadership which quite uniquely is aimed at staff, leaders and inmates. Furthermore prison officers, leaders, former inmates and even a mother of a former inmate are contributing to developing and teaching the change leadership courses.

USER-INVOLVEMENT IS RECOGNISED – HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?

In 2013 a new vision and strategy was launched in the Prison and Probation Service and here both user-surveys and user-involvement are recognised as key tools in the vision of Bringing people safely to a life free of crime.

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This shows that the initial user-involvement project involving two prisons has developed into a long-lived and broader-scoped strategy. The analysis above suggests that when engaging users in social innovation, the users themselves become great assets for dissemination. This in turn implies that central management roles shift from telling people what to do, to enabling people to tell others what they have done.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buur, J. & Matthews, B. (2008): “Participatory innovation” Internation Journal of Innovation Management; vol. 12, nr. 3, September. pp 255-273 Feature (2009): ”Murene falder når fangerne sveder”, Artical in the international Company Magazine Feature, 3rd issue, september 2009, Cowi, Copenhagen. Kriminalforsorgen, Cowi & Via Design (2009): ”Når det umulige samarbejde lykkes”, Rapport om Brugerdreven forbedring af arbejds- og afsoningsmiljøet i Kriminalforsorgen. Kriminalforsorgen Rørdam, Birgitte (2014): Indsatte og ansatte indleder samarbejde. Article september 4, 2014 on Kriminalforsorgen.dk Torfing, Jacob (2014): Powerpoint presentation: “Innovationsspredning i den offentlige sektor”, Roskilde Universitet. Powerpoint slide nr. 9

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By Lars Simonsen, Maersk Oil (formerly), now DONG Energy

TOP-DOWN APPROACHES TO STIMULATION OF CORPORATE INNOVATION (R&D) ACTIVITIES In his article, Lars Simonsen investigates how deliberate facilitative leadership and active engagement in open innovation contributes to the innovative success of a department. He also investigates how maintaining diverse collaborative relations allows for different approaches to thinking, inside and outside the box respectively, both of which are crucial for innovative success.

The Author Lars Simonsen has studied the role of authentic leadership in technical teams at Maersk Oil. He is currently Geoscience Manager at DONG Energy.

About the article In his article, Lars Simonsen investigates how deliberate facilitative leadership and active engagement in open innovation contributes to the innovative success of a department. He also investigates how maintaining diverse collaborative relations allows for different approaches to thinking, inside and outside the box respectively, both of which are crucial for innovative success.

DURING A STUDY OF INNOVATION PROCESSES in Maersk oil, it was not-

ed that the innovation processes in one particular department appeared to run very smoothly. The department’s organisation, leadership approaches and methods of cooperation are important elements in the smooth innovation processes, and the study revealed significant knowledge about these three areas.

The department is part of the Subsurface section in Maersk Oil’s Danish business unit and is led by a Section Head, who is in charge of three Team Leads and 22 Technical Specialists. The empirical data consists of three interviews with the Section Head and two Team Leads, who were asked to describe a specific innovative project, in order to create a context in which the topics of leadership and innovation process could be analysed.

THE ORGANISATION OF THE DEPARTMENT

The formal hierarchy in the department mirrors the hierarchy of other, more operational departments in the organisation, and the Section Head has a strong power position. Similarly, the Team Leaders have strong power positions in their respective groups. So, formally, the authority of the leaders in the department in question is in line with that of traditional Directive Leaders as described by Bens (2006). None of the interviewed leaders appear to be in doubt of possessing this formal power.

LEADERSHIP APPROACHES

Technical competences and dedication are valued highly by the leaders, and a large proportion of the staff, including the interviewed Team Leads, are highly skilled specialists, who have been hand-picked by the Section Head from other departments or companies. The department’s Section Head actively seeks out and combines people with psychological profiles that he regards as being right for his department and for the task. There is a strong consensus around the intention of being innovative, driven by a shared understanding that innovation is an important factor in ensuring that the company will be able to achieve its goals. Being able to ask good questions is regarded as a significant qualifying skill. Innovation takes time, and having time allocated to innovative initiatives is regarded as crucial. Strong emphasis is put on project management, which is regarded as a necessary tool for controlling resourc-

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es and time, and for stakeholder management. However, there is an equally strong belief among the leaders that a formalised process for running projects does not exist, and that such a process is not needed for the typical small scale ‘under the radar’ innovation projects which are run in the department. The department has a specific innovation budget, which is mentioned as promoting innovative initiatives. The Team Leaders benefit from an extended degree of freedom. The Section Head’s style shows trust and he dislikes having to ‘manage’ his leaders, and hence avoids micromanagement. However, in a group of technically excellent and dedicated people, prima donna behaviour and friction does occur. Therefore the Section Head nurtures his staff, primarily the Team Leads. He also mediates and resolves friction when it occurs.

COLLABORATION AND NETWORKS

Figure 1 illustrates the typical collaboration matrix for the innovation project process in the department concerned, as it was described during the interviews.

Figure 1. Typical collaboration matrix for the innovation project process in the department concerned (Central). Hierarchical ties are marked with blue arrows; collaborative ties are marked with green lines. Stippling and line thickness is used to mark the strength of the tie. The blue ‘side’ concerns internal organisational processes, the red ‘side’ concerns external processes.

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INTERNAL COLLABORATION (CENTRAL AND RIGHT PORTION OF FIGURE 1)

Innovation projects are perceived as team efforts, and getting other members of the team ‘on-board’ is perceived as a good way to ensure continuous enthusiasm for the project. All the leaders stress the importance of communication, and when initiating projects the Team Leads aim to make clear to the team what the success criteria and the potential impact on business of the project are. Brain storming sessions are used to screen and rank individual techniques. All department members are expected to collaborate as much as possible with their peers from other departments (Right portion of Figure 1), and the leaders regard having a network of peers as crucial for being able to perform. They all actively work on providing the members of their group with a solid technical network of peers.

EXTERNAL COLLABORATION (LOWER LEFT PORTION OF FIGURE 1)

Very close contacts with external partners is perceived as imperative for having an innovative organisation. The benefits of close and frequent contact with other players inside and outside the industry were stressed repeatedly in the interviews, and it is evident that the innovation locus of the department is located at the interface towards the partnering companies, with the mutual benefit being stressed.

‘OUT OF CONTEXT’ CONTACTS (UPPER LEFT PORTION OF FIGURE 1)

Particularly the Section Head stresses how he actively seeks inspiration by participating in various ‘out of context’ activities, and he stresses that this type of contact has resulted in successful products.

FINDINGS FACILITATIVE LEADERSHIP

Even though there seems to be no doubt in the minds of the three leaders that they are empowered by the company to lead their respective groups, it appears

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that much of the innovative success of the department is linked to the facilitative behaviour of the leaders in general and the Section Head in particular. The concept of facilitative leadership as characterised by Bens (2006) and Ghais (2005) closely matches the behaviour of the Section Head. He is group process focused, collaborative, systematically empowering, partnership and network building, provides decision making structures and enables others to get things done. With their strong emphasis on project management, the leadership styles of the two Team Leaders appear to be more that of today’s more engaging leader (Bens, 2006); they are highly involved with the content of the work but they also show relatively high involvement in relationship aspects. Of the characteristics of a facilitating leader that Ghais (2005) lists, both Team Leads appear to focus more on creativity and on knowledge of techniques and activities, and less on in-depth understanding of their groups. Vogt et al. (2003) show how we in western culture focus entirely on having the “right answer” rather than discovering the “right question”. Exactly this aspect appears to be one of the strong points of the leaders, and it appears as if particularly the Section Head is open to alternative approaches to problems, i.e. he is ready to ask alternative questions about his problem.

OPEN INNOVATION

The interviews demonstrate how the department’s leaders are very concerned with establishing and maintaining good network ties, both internally in the organisation and to external partners. The fact that the department’s hierarchy mirrors the hierarchy of the operational departments facilitates cross-departmental communication and networking, as it is clear who your peers are. Chesbrough developed the concept of Open Innovation, which he defines as: “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively” (Chesbrough, 2006 p.1). The Open Innovation model proposes that organisations can and should use external ideas and paths to market equally well as internal ideas and paths to mar-

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ket. Chesbrough (2006) graphically illustrates the concept of Open Innovation as a funnel filled with holes, illustrating the deliberate inflows and outflows of knowledge. Traditional ‘closed’ innovation he illustrates with a funnel without holes. The relation of Chesbrough’s innovative models to the collaborative relations of the department is sketched on Figure 2. In situations where the department participates in optimisations of the day to day operational activities in the company, the Closed Innovation model is at play. In situations where products are developed in close contact with external partners, and where ownership of the resulting products is shared between Maersk Oil and their partners, or owned entirely by the partners, the department displays the characteristics of Open Innovation. The leaders all clearly state that they regard the interface between the department and the external partners as the innovation locus of their department.

Figure 2. The relation of Chesbrough’s (2006) innovative models to the collaborative relations of the department. The upright funnel without holes at the interface between the department’s Hierarchy and the Operational Hierarchy marks an interface dominated by Closed Innovation. The tilted funnel with holes at the interface between the department’s Hierarchy and the External resources marks an interface dominated by Open Innovation.

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THINKING INSIDE AND THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

Ghais (2005) stresses the importance of thinking inside the box, which to her means having some structure, rules, or constraints within which most creativity can flourish. While most creativity, according to Ghais, takes place inside the box, typically in the realm of incremental innovation, there is also value in thinking outside the box, which to Ghais, often means eliminating constraints or rules that were imagined, not real; conventional or not required. In this particular case, one can argue that thinking inside the box typically happens at the interface between the department and the operational departments, in an environment of structure, rules and constraints, typically in the realm of incremental innovation, which is associated with operational optimisation. More creativity flourishes at the interface between the department and its partners, as structure, rules and constraints will have to be modified to satisfy all actors. In that area one can expect thinking both inside and outside the box. Finally, the emphasis on maintaining ‘out of context contacts’ could be regarded as an area of thinking outside the box, as different structures, rules and constraints apply in different contexts. Figure 3 is a sketch of the various areas of thinking in relation to the department X network.

Figure 3. The relation of Ghais’ (2005) concept of thinking inside and outside the box to the collaborative relations of Department X.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS

The innovative capabilities of the department are obvious: they maintain a portfolio of innovative projects within the department, and they hit the target in an estimated 1 of 5 to 10 projects. It has been shown that facilitative leadership, particularly by the Section Head is recognised by his Team Leads as contributing to this success. Likewise, the interviewed leaders all stress that the close cooperation between the department and internal, and particularly external partners, contributes significantly to the innovative success of the department.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bens, I. (2006): “Facilitating to lead! Leadership strategies for a networked world”. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Chapter 1: pp. 1 – 33 Chesbrough, H. (2006): “Open Innovation: A New Paradigm for Understanding Industrial Innovation”, in Chesbrough, H., Vanhaverbeke, W. & West, J. (Eds.) (2006): “Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm”, Oxford University Press, chapter 1, pages 1 – 25 Ghais, S. (2005): “Extreme Facilitation. Guiding Groups through Controversy and Complexity”. Jossey-Bass, San Fransico. Introduction, Part one; chapter 1 and 2: pp. 1-46. Vogt, E. E.; Brown, J. and Isaacs, D. (2003): “The Art of Powerful Questions. Catalyzing Insight, Innovation, and Action”, published by Whole Systems Associates, California, p. 1 – 14.

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By Bo Hasseriis, Danish Broadcasting Corporation

CONSTRUCTIVE USE OF ARTEFACTS IN CREATIVE PROCESSES The article investigates the conscious use of artefacts in TV production. The use of these is widespread across any genre of TV production, and the article suggests that the initial approach and work process surrounding the use of artefacts has a significant influence on almost any situation surrounding the production of a TV programme. Based on the analysis, Hasseriis suggests that a specific and investigative approach to the use of artefacts promises the greatest potential in respect to the process and the final product.

The Author Bo Hasseriis is employed by the Danish National Broadcasting Corporation (DR) as Editor.

About the article The article investigates the conscious use of artefacts in TV production. The use of these is widespread across any genre of TV production, and the article suggests that the initial approach and work process surrounding the use of artefacts has a significant influence on almost any situation surrounding the production of a TV programme. Based on the analysis, Hasseriis suggests that a specific and investigative approach to the use of artefacts promises the greatest potential in respect to the process and the final product.

Danish National Broadcasting Corporation (DR). DR was the first media enterprise in Denmark, currently holding 3000 employees. DR is one of the oldest public service organisations in the world.

THE DELIBERATE AND CONSCIOUS USE OF ARTEFACTS can function

as a medium to influence and alter stagnant processes. But it also performs a role when a relevant artefact enables relations to be formed between people engaging in various parts of creative processes.

This analysis is based on two cases identified at Danish National Broadcasting. The focal point is TV production, where the use of artefacts is both visible and widespread. In this case, artefacts are not the set design, the clothes worn by the presenter, or jingles or graphics. These are part of the unchanging platform on which the product, the TV programme, is built. Here, the artefact is defined as being an item with a physical and tangible presence. They are sought, found and finally used with direct presence in the studio and are part of the final product â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the interview. Thus artefacts are directly related to the story, the problem or the research question posed, and thus are an integral part of the process. Examples can vary from milk bottles to books, from dolls to model aircraft.

Deadline, DR Media archive studio photo, September 2007 (Martin Breum, presenter, interviewing Tal R, artist)

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Case: DR2 Dagen Case observed: Orhan GĂśkcen, planner. DR2 Dagen is a daily current affairs programme, aired weekdays between 17:00 and 18:00. He was observed over two full days, May 2013. The case was chosen since the governing concept of the programme states that artefacts are to be integrated into the show, when possible. The observation showed how Orhan would work on a story concerning how music was used as therapy for patients just out of surgery. He initially focused on the music itself, but when a lengthy series of explorative questions identified a musical device, he quickly chose to use the device instead of the music, since this was the much needed artefact, representing both music and problem. The definition of the artefact was the result of a deliberate and lengthy process, but then proved to be the common ground needed for an ongoing process leading towards the show being aired the following day. And the choice of artefact made the process seem very easy and fluent, since both planner and presenter easily understood how the musical device helped the story along. In the end, the musical device was presented in the studio, thus giving the viewer an inside view as to how music would be used in the hospital. A bridge from viewer to studio was formed. This case showed that the successful use of the artefact is based on careful choice, and builds on a process that is partly investigative and creative, but also deliberate and conscious.

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Case: DR2 Gadens Parlament Case observed: Anne Blume, planner. Gadens Parlament was a daily debate programme, aired weekdays from 19:30 to 20:00. This seemed like an ideal case, since it was the only programme concept I could find that directly stated that the use of artefacts in the show was mandatory. This led to the belief that the case could give insights into the creative use of artefacts, since the artefact would be chosen every day, hence experience in identification and use would be present. But it turned out differently. This case did not invest much energy into exploring what artefact to choose. They needed an artefact to represent how a person on social services would shop in a discount warehouse. But Anne did not take any time for discussion about how this could best be shown, nor did she discuss the artefact with the person on welfare, or the rest of the staff at the programme. The result was that the show aired with a shopping cart full of groceries that was clearly an add-on, that had no function in the show. The shopping cart was positioned in the centre of the picture, but after a couple of minutes it was moved aside, and the content never discussed. The case clearly demonstrates that if the artefact is chosen automatically, and never discussed or challenged, it will not function. In this case the artefact is a mere prop, and is never used or integrated into the show. It does not create a bridge from the artificial world of the studio, since it only functions as an add-on, that nobody recognises.

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FROM TRIVIAL TO EXCITING

My interest in the field dates back to 2007. As an editor, I was trying to figure out how to construct an interview with a Danish artist, Tal R. We were faced with the task of trying to transform something absolutely trivial to something interesting. In this case, he was opening an exhibition, and we wanted to show his artistry. But he would not participate in anything resembling an artistic process in the studio. We were struggling with this problem, facing the fact that we could not put paper and pen on the table. Finally we came up with the idea of putting balls of coloured modelling clay on the table, a simple idea that would not cross the boundary specified by the artist. Initially the interview was dull and boring, but then the artefact did its magic. Tal R leaned forward, took hold of a couple of the balls, and repositioned them on the table, and for the next ten minutes we were witnessing the deliberate creative process of a genius, as he moved the balls around, explaining what he was doing. This interview went from trivial and abstract to physically tangible, present and universally interesting. Here, the balls became the interpretative medium, making it easy to understand a very abstract flow of words. But on a different level they also represent the inherent ability of the artefact to transform the process preceding the interview, creating a bridge from the artist through the interviewer, and finally reaching the viewer. The situation described has puzzled me since. Something of importance clearly took place, and I was painfully aware that the balls did a lot more than being visible on screen. Since then, I have often witnessed how artefacts are introduced in a process, but more often than not, they do not seem to be able to produce the magic trick witnessed back in 2007. But the ability of the artefact to engage and change a process is explored by Wallace, who argues that when designing, the artefact can emerge from the design process, but when emerging, it will alter the definition of the problem posed in the early phases of design work. (Wallace, 2012) Though the physical nature and influence of artefacts in the development of processes is well known, little is known about how to engage in the process of defining the artefact. And less is known about how the early choice of artefact influences your hypothesis, process and finally the product. A Professor at MIT Media Lab, Joseph Paradiso, claims the tangible nature of artefacts provides

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a major difference. If you can touch and manipulate items, you engage in an almost primal process of development. (Paradiso 2004:174) Both of the theories above could lead to the belief that any artefact present will transform the process and product in a positive and conclusive manner. But I have witnessed how choosing an artefact without enthusiasm, discussion or even careful selection does little more than give you a useless symbol. When chosen correctly, exploring the artefact itself, it creates a strong focal point from the beginning to the end of the process, and even has the ability to transform relations between stakeholders. Finally the artefact becomes the concrete focal point of the final product, thus forming some sort of common ground for all involved.

THE DIFFICULT OBSERVATION

The starting point for this paper was a personal experience, and my initial concern about the methodology mainly concerned my role and position as an insider. I attempted to design a study that would allow me to observe and analyse in the most objective manner possible. But I came to realize that this could not be achieved, due to my own position in the organisation. I have inherent knowledge of all aspects of production and development, as well as the organisation and the people. This problem of being a â&#x20AC;&#x153;double insiderâ&#x20AC;? (Adriansen et al. 2009: 152) became a strength and not a weakness. If I had constructed a method of anthropological observation, where my own initial knowledge of people and process was disregarded, I would have also have to disregard the vast amount of knowledge I possess as a professional, a colleague and a leader. Seeing this as strength is taken further by Bent Flyvbjerg, who argues that the expert investigator can conduct a narrow and carefully executed study where single cases produce a large amount of specific and general knowledge. (Flyvbjerg, 2006) The empirical data was obtained through two separate cases, observed anthropologically. One focuses on a planner, Orhan GĂśkcen, at the current affairs programme, DR2 Dagen, and the other on a planner at a now discontinued debate program, Gadens Parlament. To support the observations, five additional interviews were conducted to provide knowledge of aspects not covered by the observations.

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At DR2 Dagen, Orhan had the task of developing content for the show the following day, with specific emphasis on content including artefacts. The second planner had the same specified task, but here the similarity ended. Hence a common framework for placing the observed situations in time was needed. A timeline interview was developed, supporting the observations. (Adriansen, 2012: 15)

Orhan Gökcen, xcan be seen in the background. (DR Copenhagen, April 2013).

The timeline stipulated four segments, and in each segment it was possible to position relevant theory, analysing how the cases behaved differently. This timeline provides a chronological and visual overview of the process. Also, it engages the interviewee in the interview process; it helps to isolate specific events. (Adriansen, 2012: 15) The subjects of the cases showed dissimilar behaviour, though facing the same task. Orhan would spend his time asking a lot of investigative questions in the initial phase of the process, and allowed himself to be surprised when Drawing of timeline, following the development he found an artefact through of content at DR2 Dagen (own drawing). dialogue. He would continue to refine the artefact itself, asking the same hypothetical question: “how are we going to use it”. He would gladly revisit the initial phases, and he clearly used the artefact to create a relationship with the stakeholder as well as the presenter.

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Jakob Illeborg, Presenter DR2, Dagen, head nurse Pia Dybdahl and 3rd guest. The artefact is touched.

In the end, this led to the use of the artefact in the studio being seamlessly integrated into the final product, establishing a relationship between presenter and interviewee. This also created a bridge between the constructed world of the studio, and the real world outside. On the other hand, the subject of the other case heaved a sigh of relief when she identified a few simple objects, almost without asking the interviewee. The selections were not questioned, and she went directly from a very short explorative phase to actual use of the artefact. The initial specification of the artefact remained unchanged in the final product.

THE APPROACH REFLECTS THE PROCESS.

Whether the artefact was good or bad, whether it was giving anything of value to the final product, is of little interest here. But it is interesting to observe that two very different approaches also provided two very different products. In the case of Orhan, he would not lock on to a single solution until very late in the process. Instead, the majority of time was spent formulating the right research questions, and when he identified the artefact he experienced a â&#x20AC;&#x153;lightbulb

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moment”. This is defined by Darsø as the moment you realize you have the right solution. (Darsø, 2001: 195, 350) But this moment is something Orhan worked for. According to Jeanne Liedka, the most successful way of designing is to create a virtual world or laboratory, where you can conduct experiments risk-free.

Pia Dybdahl, head nurse, Odense Universitetshospital, holding the musical device outside studio, 17th April 2013.

“[The designer should] begin by generating a series of creative “what if ” hypotheses, and then selecting the most promising one for further inquiry. This inquiry takes the form of a more evaluative “if then” sequence, in which the logical implications of that particular hypothesis are more fully explored and tested.” (Liedtka, 2004: 194) This indicates that finding and developing the best artefact is not a matter of choosing from a list of artefacts, but instead working on the hypothesis driving the process that leads to seeking and finding the artefact - very much the way Orhan Gökcen would conduct his work, by revisiting his initial research question. Still, the artefact influenced most of the process, and was instrumental in reformulating the initial idea as well as the final questions that appeared in the interview. At Gadens Parlament, the planner did not develop the hypothesis preceding the artefact. It was chosen and immediately put into the final manuscript. It was never found through investigative method, but only identified as “that is the one we will use”. In reality this is probably often the case when using artefacts in creative processes. The artefact is merely used as a prop, like the skull of Yorick present on stage in Hamlet, since it is referred to in the manuscript. But in this case, it cannot lend any value to the process, nor bridge the studio and the real world.

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MORE THAN A PHYSICAL PRESENCE

It is clear that the use of artefacts is about much more than the visible value present in a TV studio. These cases indicate that if an artefact is carefully chosen as part of an explorative process, it will have the ability to change and influence the following process as well as the final product. Thus, artefacts are useful in almost any creative process, since they hold the power to transform the process from being very abstract to very concrete. Hence, I would suggest that you use artefacts early in the process, regarding them as a creative constraint, and not products in their own right. By doing this, you can allow the artefact to change the hypothesis governing your process, and they clearly influence the thinking of the persons involved. You should investigate and question whether your initial choice of artefact is correct, and you should be courageous enough to discard it and restart your thinking and selection. It is important you acknowledge that the artefact obviously can be of value in itself, but also represents something of higher complexity too. If you look at a milk carton, it can be seen as a mere container of milk. But it could also be regarded as an example of high quality Danish dairy products, or an example of the various produce we choose export, or even as the physical result of how we exploit nature to our advantage. All of these related values represent a separate line of thinking and require a new initial phase of ideas, hypothesis and process to be undertaken, honed and finally used. And in the final use of the artefact it will almost always be able to create a bridge between the abstract and the concrete, as was the case with the balls of clay. The use of artefacts is clearly of value. So, when used aimlessly and unimaginatively they will seldom do any harm to the creative process, but in such a case their presence will be ignored quite rapidly. But when used correctly they help move creative processes along, and release a plethora of new and associated ideas. To do so, you need to introduce the idea of an artefact quickly, you need to revisit your choice often and you need to question what the artefact represents. But you will find that the carefully selected artefact will contribute to the process, and create the common ground needed for stakeholders trying to move an abstract creative process along.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adriansen, H. K. (2012): Timeline Interviews: a tool for conducting history research. Qualitative Studies 3(1) 40-55) Austin, R. D. & Darsø, L. (2009): “A Framework for Examining the Concept of Closure in Innovation Process”, in Niina Koivunen and Alf Rehn (eds.) Creativity and the Contemporary Economy. Copenhagen Business School Press Flyvbjerg, B. (2006): ‘Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study research’, Qualitative Inquiry, volume 12, number 2 Hanne, K. A., Madsen, L.M. (2009): Studying the making of geographical knowledge: The implications of insider interviews. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift, Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 63, 145?153 Liedtka, J. (2004): Design Thinking – the role of hypothesis generation and testing. Stanford University Press Wallace, J. (2012): “Exploring relations: Emergent artefacts of ethnography and processual engagement of design”, Ashgat Publishing

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By Anne Murphy, Via University College

ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP – A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF HOW INNOVATION OPPORTUNITIES CAN BE CREATED IN ORGANISATIONS The article explores an employee’s entrepreneurial leadership processes of innovation, related but not limited to the improvement of study conditions for bilingual teacher training students with a foreign origin, and the context that made such processes possible.

The Author Anne Murphy researched at VIA University College, Campus Silkeborg, Denmark, within the Department of Teacher Education.

About the article The

article

explores

entrepreneurial

leadership

employeeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s processes

of innovation, related but not limited to the improvement of study conditions for bilingual teacher training students with a foreign origin, and the context that made such processes possible.

VIA University College VIA is Denmarkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest university college, with 2,000 staff and 18,000 students, on seven campuses. VIA offers a wide range of education programmes, in areas such as health, social education, technology, trade, design, business and animation. Campus Silkeborg has full programmes within the fields of teaching and nursing.

ORGANISATIONS NEED INNOVATION BUT USUALLY resist it (Nissley,

2007). The following case study shows how this paradox can be overcome by shifting focus from innovation management to entrepreneurial leadership. This shift of focus builds on a belief that innovation in the postmodern economy is no longer limited to a systematic search for innovation opportunity, but is more a question of creating potential for innovation (Hjorth et al., 2012). How this can be done, by practising entrepreneurial leadership in the context of VIA University College, Silkeborg Teacher Training College, is the central issue of this article.

THE CONCEPT OF ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP

The essence of the concept ‘Entrepreneurial Leadership’, developed by Hjorth and Gartner (2012), can be explained as three elements: • • •

From a process perspective it is about the relational leadership dynamic ‘to move and be moved’. From a collective perspective it is about mobilising collective creativity From a complexity perspective it is about balancing managerial and entrepreneurial forces

Entrepreneurial leadership moves other bodies from rest (and receptivity) to movement (and spontaneity) for the purpose of increasing social/collective creativity (Hjorth and Gartner, 2012). Entrepreneurial leadership belongs to all levels in the organisation and becomes central in relation to creating more innovative organisations. Whether you are assigned to lead innovation or you are an employee with an urge to experiment in your daily practice with new ideas, understanding and practicing entrepreneurial leadership can change the way you perceive and do your job, resulting in potential for innovation on an unforeseen scale. It is important to note though, that in this case study, two conditions in the organisation have been found critical for entrepreneurial leadership practices to be possible: a strategy that sets a clear direction but at the same time allows ample space for experiments, and a servant management, supporting experiments built on relations of trust and flexible budgeting to meet unforeseen expenses.

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FORUM FOR DIVERSITY – A CASE STUDY OF ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE

This case study from VIA University College, Silkeborg Teacher Training College, illustrates how entrepreneurial leadership can manifest itself in practice. A lecturer, engaged in a development project to improve the study conditions for bilingual students with a foreign origin, was moved by a student’s statement “‘You don’t know what this is all about”’. Instead of writing a report about how the study conditions could be improved, based on interviews with the students (what could be understood as a re-active response), his response was active: he succeeded in gathering a group of students for a meeting to discuss the issue. The students became active participants in the process of improving the study conditions. The result, that no-one could have foreseen, was the creation of a new space within the college, Forum for Diversity, an association for teacher training students. Forum for Diversity participated in creating multiple innovation opportunities, not only in relation to study conditions, but also developing curricula, planning study excursions and other student activities on campus. The lecturer’s role was transformed into that of an entrepreneurial leader. Next, he was moved to engage the students in an experiment: participation in a theatre production in collaboration with the Actor’s School at Aarhus Theatre, yet another ‘space for play’ (Hjorth, 2005), separated from but still part of the college. This resulted in first, a professional theatre performance touring Denmark, followed by a new curricular module in both educational organisations. All the time, the lecturer was moving by ‘stepping aside’ (Serres, 1995b in Hjorth et al. 2012) to create multiple spaces needed to ensure continuous mobilisation of collective creativity. Reflecting on and acknowledging what can and cannot happen in different spaces, (class room, meeting room, rehearsal room, a stage, a touring theatre ensemble) the lecturer explained this movement: ‘In order for the created ‘space for play’, Forum for Diversity, not to stiffen into yet another ‘institution in the institution’, it had to continuously change and move into other forms. All the time I am conscious of moving’. The temporary theatre-ensemble/collaboration intensified the collective creativity, leading to innovation. The lecturer, although still participating in all spaces, continued to step aside, looking for new spaces to maintain movement. This practice, of stepping aside, by continuously creating new spaces for play, becomes funda-

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mental in collectively creating potential for innovation in this case. The process of transforming the students with special needs into active participants and valuable resources constituted the result the lecturer initially was moved to create. The lecturer could not have foreseen that the process would open up many other innovation opportunities as the process moved on. Finally the lecturer was, in the process, also seen to balance managerial and entrepreneurial forces by respecting the strategic frame of the organisation and ensuring a relation of trust with his manager, keeping her informed and making sure he had results to present when needed, although this was secondary to him. As a student explained: ‘It is the process that is important to him’. In short, the lecturer practises leadership centred on receptivity: (attentiveness, careful listening, presence and openness) and spontaneity: (creating spaces for play, producing a ‘call’ that the students long for) and thus promotes collective creativity. His style is minimalistic and improvisational, focused on process, movement and creation of multiplicity while he is balancing managerial and entrepreneurial forces - entrepreneurial leadership (Hjorth el al. 2012).

RESEARCH METHOD

To capture the tacit dimension of practical knowing, in order to describe how entrepreneurial leadership can manifest itself in practice I have had to develop my own research method. Studying entrepreneurial leadership has been a process of ‘uncovering layers’; first tuning in to the senses of the researcher by pre-observations in an informal interaction with participants; second establishing the situated-ness in relation to time and space, by use of timeline interview; third gaining deep sensory knowledge on the phenomenon by observations of interactions-in-the-making; fourth teasing out the tacit knowledge by the use of a more artistic approach as preparation (interviewee was given creative homework); fifth exploring sensory knowledge of the aesthetic experiences by participant construction of (artistic) data in an in-depth interview; sixth clarifying and validating observations and data by interviewing relations.

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CASE STUDY FINDINGS

Six leadership qualities were found to be essential in creating more potential for innovation in the organisation: 1. Reflexive practice Reflexivity has been defined as ‘the process in which we reflect on the consequences of our reflections and on how articulations create reality’ (Adriansen and Knudsen, 2013). A processual perspective enabled us to see how the lecturer was moved to act on his sensations and was affected by the students’ response. That in turn made him able to reframe the problem, which led to the creative idea. Knowledge created from sensory experiences has thus been found to be an important element in leadership of innovation. To practice entrepreneurial leadership one has to be aware of and have the courage to make use of sensory knowledge in interactions with colleagues, customers and stakeholders. 2. Experimental, collaborative practice of entrepreneurship Creative ideas are worthless unless they are put into action. The emphasis on entrepreneurship as organization creation (Gartner in Hjorth et al. 2012) is fundamental in understanding entrepreneurial leadership. The analysis of the case showed that three factors are important to note, when entering the experimental phase of putting creative ideas into action: a ‘failing forward approach’, where failure is viewed as an opportunity to learn and innovate; an ability to hold the position of not knowing for long enough for the new to emerge (the process studied was more than two years), and a focus on the process as the result. In other words, to practise entrepreneurial leadership, one has to let go of wanting to control the process and the outcome. 3. Flexibility in relation to role and position When focusing on the dynamic relational processes, the structure of the organisation becomes more fluid and flexible, which opens up innovative opportunities and new resources to be exploited. Roles and positions are not viewed as static entities, but as dynamic processes. This case study showed that to practise entrepreneurial leadership one therefore has to show flexibility in relation to role and position. 4. Participatory practice Entrepreneurial leadership is a collective relational process, not an individual

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achievement. Based on the aesthetic expressions of collective leadership in this case study, it could be argued that the importance of the aesthetic qualities of human relations implies that leadership of innovation is a participatory practice. It is through participating that an ensemble quality (Hjorth, Austin and O’Donnell, 2010/11) of collective creativity can be achieved. This is needed in order to keep the process moving and to create multiple innovation opportunities. 5. Process of stepping aside – creation of multiplicity The analysis of the case has clearly shown the importance of creating multiple spaces. It is the process of constant movement by stepping aside that opens up the many new opportunities for innovation. Practising leadership by stepping aside is a ‘practice on the move’, that intensifies relations and processes. Practising entrepreneurial leadership becomes an improvisational dance that cannot be planned, designed or controlled, but is learned through practising together. 6. Paradoxical leadership practice Finally, the analysis of the case has shown that practising entrepreneurial leadership depends on an ability to live with and embrace paradoxes. Achieving an ensemble quality in Forum for Diversity was not achieved overnight, but took some 18 months and at the same time renewal (of space) and movement was needed for the process not to stagnate. Being part of ‘the system’ and at the same time wanting to break with it was in this case experienced as a kind of schizophrenia, overcome to a large extent by humour.

PERSPECTIVES

This case study can serve as inspiration to both managers and employees in organisations in relation to management innovation, organisational development, strategy development and competence development at all levels. In particular, related to the educational sector, this case study is also a unique example of education in entrepreneurship, that could be investigated further. Entrepreneurial leadership is for everyone interested in contributing to new value creation in organisations. To practise it – open up all your senses and make use of them in active responses to the challenges at hand – and above all – move and be moved.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adriansen, H. K. and Knudsen, H. (2013): ‘Two ways to support reflexivity: Teaching managers to fulfil an undefined role’. Teaching Public Administration, (forthcoming) Gartner, W.B. (2012): ‘Entrepreneurship as organisation creation’ in: Hjorth, D. Eds. Handbook on Organisational Entrepreneurship (pp. 21-30) UK. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited Hjorth, D. (2005): ‘Organisational entrepreneurship. With de Certeau on creating heterotopias (or spaces for play)’. Journal of management inquiry, 14(4), pp. 386-398 Hjorth, D. Austin, R. and O’Donnell S. (2010/11): ‘Learning to Lead Collective Creativity from Miles Davis I-III’, The Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, pp. 1-9 Hjorth D. and Gartner W.B. (2012): ‘Moving and being moved: ideas, perspectives and 59 theses on entrepreneurial leadership’ in: Hjorth D. (Eds), Handbook on Organisational Entrepreneurship (pp. 362-376) UK. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited Hjorth et al. (2012). Handbook on Organisational Entrepreneurship. Hjorth D. (Eds) UK. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited Nissley, N. (2007). ‘Creativity and innovation: Good leadership requires a combination of the two’. Leadership in Action, 27 (2) pp. 21-22 Serres, M. (1995b). Genesis. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press

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By Elias Zafirakos, BioPeople, University of Copenhagen

KNOWLEDGE BROKERING AS A SILO BUSTER In this article Zafirakos explores how deliberate use of knowledge brokering can help specialist environments to become more innovative. The article is based on findings in Zafirakos Master thesis: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Innovation in a Knowledge Broker perspectiveâ&#x20AC;?, 2014.

The Author Elias Zafirakos, MSc, EBA is Science & Innovation Cluster Manager at Biopeople, Denmark’s life science cluster at the University of Copenhagen.

About the article In this article Zafirakos explores how deliberate use of knowledge brokering can help specialist environments to become more innovative. The article is based on findings in Zafirakos Master thesis: “Innovation in a Knowledge Broker perspective”, 2014.

Bioneer A/S and DELTA A/S The two companies discussed and used as cases in the article are both independent not-for-profit research and technology organisations, with the purpose of transferring and disseminating technical know-how, new methods and knowledge to industry and society.

EVERYWHERE THE PRESSURE TO BECOME more innovative - to come up

with innovative products, that demonstrate not just incremental but ‘truly radical’ disruptive ground-breaking innovation -is increasing. One big barrier to overcome is silo thinking, and unfortunately increased specialisation in a specific knowledge field is often accompanied by increased silo thinking. This article explains how deliberate use of knowledge brokering can help specialist environments to become more innovative.

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE BROKERING TO INNOVATION?

Knowledge brokering as an innovation model operates with the precondition that knowledge is often fragmented and isolated in ‘small worlds’. These small worlds may be physically separated or may just be social constructions (or a combination of these). The small worlds consist of knowledge domains with shared knowledge and habits that dictate and legitimate individual portfolios of do’s and don’ts. (Hargadon , 2002) These portfolios constrain individuals to appropriate actions and legitimate these actions as the right way to do things. Such behavioural patterns are a barrier to innovation because new ways of doing things are not requested or wanted. Consciousness about the existence of these small worlds may enable specialist environments to become more innovative. The central idea of knowledge brokering as an innovation model is to transfer established knowledge from one domain to solve a problem in another domain, where this knowledge is new. The existence of isolated knowledge domains is the precondition to use knowledge brokering to innovate, and awareness of how to penetrate these societal structures is the key to knowledge brokering. Based on these observations Hargadon has developed an innovation model for knowledge brokering that involves five steps: access to different knowledge domains; bridging (strategies to move resources between the domains); learning about existing knowledge in each domain; linking this knowledge to own knowledge, and finally building supportive structures around emerging new innovations. The first two steps, access and bridging, are focused on the organisational level. The next two steps, learning and linking, focus on the individual or group level,

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and finally the last step, building, again focuses on the organisational level. The model incorporates the fact that most innovations are of a recombinant nature, i.e. based on the coupling of established knowledge from different domains. (Hargadon, 2002, Van de Ven et al, 2008)

Figure 1: The Knowledge Broker (KB) has access to multiple isolated knowledge domains, 2) Bridging enables the KB to move resources between otherwise isolated domains, 3+4) learning about the resources within the domains & linking that knowledge to new situations and 5) Building new networks around emerging innovations. Own drawing.

The model emphasize the fact that radical innovation is often only radical in effect, not in origin. This is an important observation because it makes it possible to operationalise the innovation effort not only for incremental, but also for radical innovations. Examples of recombinant innovation could be the Ford assembly

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line, where knowledge of assembly lines from the meat packaging industry was transferred to the automobile industry. Another example could be the combination of suitcases and wheels into suitcases with wheels.

DEFINING INNOVATION IN THIS CONTEXT

A definition of innovation that includes recombinant innovation is given by Van de Ven: “Innovation… includes the process of developing and implementing a new idea. The idea may be a recombination of old ideas, a scheme that challenges the present order, a formula or a unique approach that is perceived as new by the individuals involved. As long as the idea is perceived as new to the people involved it is an innovative idea, even though it may appear to others as imitation of something that exists elsewhere. Included in this definition are technical innovations (new technologies, products and services) and administrative innovations (new procedures, policies and organisational forms)” (Van de Ven et al, 2008). The key aspect of using knowledge brokering to become more innovative is to identify methodologies and ways of doing things from one knowledge domain, and to adapt these to fit into another knowledge domain. In other words, to come up with radical innovation the way forward is not only to hunt for the brilliant new idea, but also to gather and combine knowledge from various knowledge domains and introduce them into new settings. The definition of innovation by Van de Ven provides a good foundation for working with the innovation process model of knowledge brokering, because it emphasises that: “As long as the idea is perceived as new to the people involved it is an innovative idea, even though it may appear to others as imitation of something that exists elsewhere”.

THE CASE STUDIES

I use the model of knowledge brokering to investigate how two research organisations within life sciences work with innovation in practice. The purpose of the investigation was to reveal drivers and barriers for innovation and creativity in the two organisations, and ultimately to reveal findings that could help the organisations to become more creative and better innovators.

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I took a holistic approach to my investigation by not looking at a specific problem to solve as a starting point. Throughout my investigation I overlooked different parts of the organisations in the search for areas and processes where I could see the potential to enhance innovation. In performing the study I chose the case study method, which seems appropriate in conjunction with the holistic approach. There is an ongoing theoretical discussion about the validity of using case studies to produce general knowledge. I will not enter that discussion, but will just note that I draw on Stake’s argument when he writes that: “Knowledge is socially constructed - we constructionists believe - and thus case study researchers assist readers in the construction of knowledge.” (Stake, 1994) The investigation was performed as two qualitative instrumental case studies of two research organisations, both GTSI’s (abbreviation for ‘Godkendt Teknologisk Service Institution’). The GTSI’s are independent, not-for-profit research and technology organisations with the purpose of transferring and disseminating technical know-how, new methods and knowledge from academia to industry. The primary data collection was eight qualitative interviews; initially three interviews at each institution and two follow-up interviews. The interviewees were carefully selected to gain insight at both executive and operational level in the organisations. The interviews were carried out as semi-structured open interviews, each lasting about one hour. To supplement the data obtained from the interviews I performed desk research and used field observations and my own knowledge from working together with the two GTSI’s.

THE FINDINGS

First of all, my study showed that the knowledge brokering model (Hargadon, 2002) provides an ideal framework for understanding the modus operandi of the two organisations. Why is this important? When looking at the organisations through the lens of knowledge brokering the rather complex workflow in these organisations was visualised in a way that made it possible for me to decipher areas with the potential for improvements. When summing up the interviewees’ description of operational procedures, thinking modes and methodologies, these seemed to describe a perfectly functioning knowledge brokering model, but such a model is not currently a part of the two

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organisations. This is interesting, because the study suggests that using the knowledge brokering innovation model as a conscious choice may increase the innovative potential in the two organisations. In the following I will briefly outline how this might come about, going through the five steps of the innovation model: The existence of isolating and isolated domains is a precondition for access to, and bridging between, the small worlds of knowledge. Recognising that this exists might provide new opportunities outside the organisation. Since the two organisations work in the life science field, obviously they have close connections to researchers and companies in this field. The nature of the organisations means that they have access to the ‘small worlds’ of the ministries, academia and private industry. By acknowledging the existence of isolated knowledge domains, the organisations can start to search actively for these domains, and broaden the range of companies that might be potential customers or collaboration partners. This might lead to exploring small worlds previously isolated from the R&D life science field, which in turn might pave the road for new innovations with a radical effect. Accessing and bridging small worlds outside the ‘R&D life science silo’ has already proved beneficial to the two organisations in a few cases, and with a conscious strategic focus on exploring new isolated knowledge domains, these few cases might multiply. Using knowledge brokering to articulate the modus operandi of the organisation might also attract new customers and collaborations. Understanding the existence of isolated knowledge domains can be used to broaden the range of companies that might be potential customers with a need for bridging activities; this in turn might lead to new learning for the GTSI, new linking possibilities, and subsequently the establishment of new network platforms.

PERSPECTIVE

While the findings are based on a study of two research organisations within life sciences, they might also support some learning and approaches that are valid in a broader setting. Depending on how one chooses to define small worlds of isolating and isolated knowledge, the model can be applied on a macro level e.g. collaboration across countries, across public and private sectors, collaboration between the small world of governmental institutions and the small world of public research

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institutions. But it might also apply to the small worlds of two institutes within a university, or the small worlds of two offices within a governmental institution, or two departments in a company. Ultimately it might even apply on an individual level, where each person constitutes an isolated knowledge domain, and the ability to build mutual trust is the key to accessing that knowledge.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Darsø, L. (2001): Innovation in the Making, Samfundslitteratur, Frederiksberg. Flyvbjerg, B. (2006): ‘Five misunderstandings about case-study research’, Qualitative Inquiry 12 (2), 219-245. Hargadon, A.B. (2002): ‘Brokering knowledge: Linking Learning and Innovation’, Research in Organisational Behaviour, Volume 24, p 41-85. Kelley, T., Littmann, J., (2001): The Art of Innovation – Lessons on Creativity from IDEO Reason, P & Bradbury, H (2001): Handbook of Action Research, Participative Inquiry and Practice, Sage Publications Stake, R. E. (1994): Case Studies, Handbook of Qualitative Research, Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y., S., Sage Publications Van de Ven, Andrew H. et al (2008): The Innovation Journey, Oxford University Press

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EXTRAS: FROM THE BOOK COVER ABOUT THE BOOK

“16 Tales of Innovation - Methods, Reflections and Practice” is a collection of innovation cases, focusing on innovation leadership in the context of complexity, and how innovation leadership unfolds in practice. The innovation tales in the book are written by leaders from a range of different organisations, where they reflect on their own innovation stories, as they unfold in everyday organisational life. Each tale builds on most recent innovation theory and research from LAICS, the executive master programme, which all leaders in the book have graduated from. When you read their different innovation stories, you will learn about their professional and personal reflections on and experience with innovation. The book provides an interesting peek into the “machine room” of organisational life and none the least the fascinating journey from innovation in theory to innovation in practice. By reading each tale you will be presented with the various tools, models and processes that were developed and piloted by each of the leaders themselves.

ABOUT LAICS

The Master in Leadership and Innovation in Complex Systems (LAICS) is an Executive Master offered as a collaboration between the Department of Education at Aarhus University and Copenhagen Business School (CBS). The LAICS Master focuses on how to create and lead innovation in complex systems, and works with the social side of organisations, making it part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Participants practise the necessary skills for leading themselves and others. They learn how to work with the social dynamics of organisations and how to navigate in formal as well as informal structures and processes.

THE EDITORS

Susanne Justesen

Lotte Darsø

Ph.D and innovation advisor with Innoversity Copenhagen, Susanne is an expert in the field of innovation leadership. Susanne holds a Ph.D. from CBS (2007) and advises a range of different companies and organisations with her expertise in innovation, diversity and collaboration. Her client-portfolio is quite impressive, serving both private and public organisations in Denmark, Europe and the US. Susanne Justesen is part of the core faculty at LAICS (Leadership and Innovation in Complex Systems), where she leads Module 2 which focuses on The Business of Innovation.

Ph.D., Associate Professor in Innovation, Department of Education, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Lotte Darsø is researcher, author and an acknowledged conference speaker both nationally and internationally. Her main areas of interest are innovation, creativity and artful approaches in educational and organisational settings. As one of Denmark’s leading experts in creativity and innovation her distinct focus is on the ’human factor’ and its significance for leading and succeeding with innovation. Lotte Darsø is programme director of the executive master programme LAICS (Leadership and Innovation in Complex Systems).

The 16 Innovation Leaders: Anette Uldall, Maersk Oil Kristina Dienhart, The City of Odense Peter Højer, Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) Katrine Schumann, Communicate2innovate Henrik Grothe, Danish Technological Institute Helle Winding, VIA Teko Design & Business Susanne Dahl, Bikuben Foundation Anneli Bartholdy, Maersk Oil Michael Meyer, Municipality of Rødovre Ingelise Schmidt, Maersk Oil Mikala Holme Samsøe, Henning Larsen Architects Peter Dexters, Danish Prison and Probation Service Lars Simonsen, Maesk Oil formerly, now DONG Energy Bo Hasseris, Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) Anne Murphy, VIA University College Elias Zafirakos, BioPeople, University of Copenhagen