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Collaborative service innovation

Designers move more and more in the direction of Service Design, in which frequently a participatory or co-design approach is used to involve service providers in the design process. The designerprovider relationship in such Service Design processes differs in four aspects from traditional client-relationships: The relationship is 1) more dynamic and interactive, 2) based on collaboratively evolving ideas and ambitions, 3) focusing on the process of innovation, rather than on the outcome, and 4) frequently based on extrinsic motivation for innovation or on fuzzy starting points. Designers experience difficulties in persuading service providers of the importance of such a collaborative approach, while providers are not familiar with this kind of approach and their organizations are not ready for such a kind of collaboration. This paper positions designer-provider relationship in Service Design processes in literature and describes a research proposal for the development of an efficient and effective participatory design intervention that stimulates collaboration between designers and service providers.

Collaborative approaches: studying horizontal and vertical working relations in schools and how they relate to collaborative-innovation practices

In Nordic countries, as well as in the Netherlands, schools have high school autonomy. In schools there are both horizontal and vertical working relations and all teachers and school principals within a school are expected to take responsibility for collaborative-innovation practices (CIP). In this paper, we describe a study investigating how both horizontal and vertical working relations relate to CIP. We used longitudinal questionnaire (2036 teachers, 157 schools) and interview data (53 teachers, 20 schools). These data were gathered in Dutch schools participating in the large-scale ‘LeerKRACHT’ program. The results show that teachers perceive horizontal and vertical factors to enhance CIP. Furthermore, especially school principals and coach-teachers seem to be able to strengthen horizontal and vertical factors which leads to more CIP. We discuss implications for research and schools in the Netherlands and beyond. Schools operate in demanding and rapidly changing environments. As a result, teachers and school principals are expected to continuously improve their school practices to maintain the quality of the education they provide. In literature on school development, change, and reform, there is an increasing emphasis on investigating how various educational interventions turn out. Some of these studies highlighted that interventions are sometimes an isolated activity of one teacher or a small group of teachers According to Vangrieken et al. in education, a strong-rooted culture of individualism, autonomy, and independence appears to be dominant. A ‘culture of collaboration’, however, has many advantages. This is also shown in research traditions of whole-school improvement. It can result in more ‘school democracy’ and more appropriate ideas and solutions for the challenges faced by schools. A growing number of schools have begun to initiate types of teacher collaboration, such as ‘professional learning communities’ and ‘data teams’. Such collaborations of teachers in schools can be called horizontal working relations. Researchers from Nordic countries for instance studied the horizontal forms of accountability and responsibility in schools. Consequently, international scholars have called for more ‘networked’ and ‘collaborative’ approaches. In the organizational literature, the notion of collaborative innovation is used for such approaches, which is characterized by both horizontal and vertical working relations. This notion fits within the broader field of school development research that approaches development as a collaborative process as well. Here both teachers’ working relations (horizontal) and working relations between teachers and school principals are studied (vertical). Studying both fits with the culture of The Netherlands and Nordic countries, which are found to be in the same cultural clusters, appreciating team-oriented and participative leadership, including horizontal and vertical working relations. However, in daily school practice it seems that breaking with the individualistic culture and changing to more collaborative-innovation practices is hard. We have an unique opportunity to study the relationship between horizontal and vertical working relations and the degree of collaborative-innovation practices (CIP). Since, in the Netherlands there is a large-scale program called LeerKRACHT that aims to stimulate CIP in schools (LeerKRACHT means “Learning force” and also “Teacher” in Dutch). The program expects from both teachers and school principals to collaborate and share resources, knowledge, and ideas and it thus asks for at least one manner of working together. The program is used by over a thousand schools in the Netherlands, and the data used in the current paper are gathered as part of a larger research project in which this program was evaluated. We study the degree of CIP in primary, secondary, and vocational schools with a mixed method approach both at the start and when working on collaborative-innovation practices in a structured way with the program ‘leerKRACHT’.

Imagineering as collaborative innovation by design (keynote)

Open innovation dynamics

Open Innovation (OI) revolves around the idea that to survive, organisations must identify, plug into, and leverage external knowledge sources as a core process in innovation. The creation and guarding of a suitable level of organisational permeability in the daily practice of OI can be challenging for both individuals and organisations as innovation processes also require openness as a social attitude. Looking at OI as real life multi-layered practices that are performed through talk and interaction, this dissertation examines how openness in OI is enabled through languaging. Close investigation of three industry-academia cases has shown that collaborators use interactional strategies to negotiate the extent of openness in meetings, to stimulate fearless knowledge sharing and to build and rebuild interpersonal relations and identities. While project work is laced with misunderstandings and negative perceptions on the one hand, openness and transparency are also highly valued by individuals on the other hand. When individuals have awareness of and ability to choose from a variety of linguistic options contingent on the social dynamics in the collaboration, this can further shape a knowledge-sharing-friendly atmosphere in which academics also feel free to pursue their own agenda. Through connecting the marco-environment and the micro-practices of the cases, it has become possible to integrate the rapidly changing context of industry-academia collaboration as a dynamic factor and to evaluate OI by the actualisation of its linguistic practices in its own regard. Hence, this dissertation describes the social, interactional and contextual boundaries of openness and shows how the linguistic choices that individuals make, enable OI as collaborative knowledge work beween industrials and academics.

Networked Innovation in Classical Music

Collaborative engineering experiences

In the fall of 1999, an international integrated product development pilot project based on collaborative engineering was started with team members in two international teams from the United States, The Netherlands and Germany. Team members interacted using various Internet capabilities, including, but not limited to, ICQ (means: I SEEK YOU, an internet feature which immediately detects when somebody comes "on line"), web phones, file servers, chat rooms and Email along with video conferencing. For this study a control group with all members located in the USA only also worked on the same project.