Innovating requires new routes

An open door you might think. However, these are not just routes to the market that need to be renewed by new propositions. Real innovation requires new cognitive routes, not just by individuals, but for the whole social system with stakeholders in and around the company. New logic, new routines, new interdependencies among actors, etc. How innovation actually happens is poorly understood by scientists and largely tacit for the innovating actors themselves. If companies are to innovate their innovation process (necessary in this era), we as scientists need to build a fundamental understanding of what innovating actually is. Such requires academics to redesign their present dominant hypothetico-deductive research approaches. This is also an innovation process like the ones mentioned above…

Theorizing as the design process

The process of developing new theory relevant to practitioners implies a grounded approach, i.e. daily practice should be the 'informant' of the researcher. The researcher in its turn should aim to move inductively beyond the stories and anecdotes of practice into the theoretical realm. However, the researcher should never lose contact with practice and need to iterate frequently between those two domains, practice and theory. Check hypothetical inferences in the data and connect conceptual theoretical insights to existing theoretical notions. Sometimes inventing new notions that support the crafting and cementing process to arrive at an integrated theory capable of providing explanations of real-life events and incidents. Such will help practitioners, innovating actors, to engage themselves in different communications with an enriched vocabulary. Overall, building theory shows remarkable similarities with design processes that evenly go through cycles of inductive, deductive and abductive processes.

Innovating is socially embedded learning

Innovating equals learning, this comes as no surprise. Innovating actors get to know the new product, service, new proposition. What else do they learn? How is the organization and its ecosystem learning? The clients, users and consumers? Suppliers, suppliers of the suppliers, sales channels? Is there any systematic, recursive and generic learning process? Or, is learning gradually changing from start to end over the innovation process? What other theoretical notions need to complement learning theories to arrive at an integrated theoretical whole? Will an investigative lens based on learning theories help us to arrive at the very molecules of innovating? In my research, I have taken this (utopian) challenge and focus exclusively on this real live and natural phenomenon of innovating (verb). The work of David Kolb on experiential learning forms a robust base to start from. Since any individual actor has to learn about his/her value-adding contributions in coherence with what others contribute to the new element, most individual learning, therefore, becomes socially embedded learning.

Collaborating with the industry

Many organizations work with consultants. Consultants are supposed to bridge the gap between the scientific domain and practice by translating insights from academia into workable and relevant models and tools for practice. This is not always the case..! In a field like innovation, the scientific literature is far behind what practice is able to do. This seems a bit like a bold observation but look at it from this way.  Suppose there is a company that has no former or recent innovation experiences (if these exist at all…). There won't be any innovation routines to rely on. If management issues the wish to innovate, the actors involved might read some books on innovation to see if that will provide them with some clues on how to get started. However, what most books do, is talking about innovation not telling you what to do. This is very different for companies that do have experiences with innovating their processes, propositions, collaborations, etc. Why? Innovation typically can't be learned from the book.

What makes the difference between having innovating experiences and reading lots of good books about it? It is the tacit dimension that makes all the difference. (tacit stands for, knowing without being able to verbalize the knowing, like swimming, biking, etc.). The tacit dimension is a relyable source for individuals that have learned over many years of practicing, however a problem if they have to explain what they have learned to others. To complicate this equation, innovating is a true social process including many different stakeholders and participants that all have to contribute 'their' thing in order to arrive at the integrated whole of the end result. Thus, experiences with innovation in organizations are to a large extent hidden in a huge tacit and socially embedded dimension … there you go!  Therefore I intensively collaborate with industry, because they know tacitly the process of innovating that I aim to describe, understand and explain… and at the same time, by theorizing in a collaborative sense the resulting insights will help these companies to understand their own pracice better. This position turns me into a researcher-consultant or consultant-researcher, depending on where you stand. This gap is not the fault of management consultants, at least not dominantly, it is academia that derailed over the last decades and embarked on trajectories that have little to do with uncovering these tacit knowledge structures. Therefore, academia in innovation, management and business needs to innovate their scientific research processes and turn these into processes that deliver theories and insights relevant for educating and teaching students that in their turn become viable contributors to society.