This paper studies the productive role of innovation in organisations. Using the post-structuralist insight that innovation is an open concept that can become performative, we shift the emphasis from analysing innovations themselves to analysing how the concept of innovation affects the organisational practices through which it acquires meaning. Deploying this framework, we studied the development of an innovation unit within TUI, a corporate tour operator. We found that actors interpreted innovation in different ways and that initially the innovation unit was considered a failure. The subsequent dramatisation of this failure resulted in a new version of this innovation unit that strengthened established actors and institutions within the organisation. Our study shows how the use of the concept of innovation in an organisation can both stimulate and hamper its innovativeness. Addressing this paradox requires sensitivity to the concept's productive role and evaluations of innovation that look beyond accomplished results.
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From the article: The ‘Axiomatic Design Methodology’ uses ‘Axioms’ that cannot be proven nor derived from physical phenomena. The axioms serve as guidelines for the design process of products and systems. The latest contribution was the addition of the ‘Complexity Axiom’ in 1999. However, the underlying theory of complexity did not get much traction by designers and their managers yet. It emphasises difficulties in the design, not primarily focussing on solutions. The ‘Theory of Complexity’ is converted to a ‘Theory of Maturity’ in this paper. It is supported with a graphical way to plot maturity as it develops. It visualises the results in a way that can be understood by all entities in a company, engineers, managers, and executives. Understanding the maturity of a system enables selection of the right measures to control it. Visualisation enables communication between the interacting parties. If successful development trajectories are understood, eventually from earlier experience, even better corrective actions can be applied. The method appears an affirmative way to graphically represent progression in design, thus presenting advances in a positive context. Though positively presented, it is not the case that the method hides problems; presumed and legitimate project progression can be quite different, which challenges the designer to understand the process. In this way, the method sends out a continuous warning to stay critical on design choices made.
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Sustainable business decision-making as villagers of the world In making our society resilient and future-proof we are faced with many complex and multi-faceted challenges and opportunities. Many promising sustainable initiatives require the proactive contribution of businesses to be successful, but fail to reach the required decision making level of individuals and companies, and thus fail to reach their positive impact. The result is a multiple waste: in creativity and innovation, in investment of the organisations involved, in opportunities to improve society and in our overall belief that we can make the necessary changes. In this project we focus on the reasons why individuals and thus companies act and decide negatively on new and existing sustainable innovations and projects, starting from the perspective that a professional’s and a company’s inherent sustainable decision making is at the heart of truly improving society. The aim is to create multiple value (economic, social and ecological) of SMEs by increasing the success rate of sustainability initiatives out of an implicit business professional’s choice to do so. Based on the theory of psychological distance, we combine exploratory case studies of successful pilots with exploratory research via interviews with business decision makers, to analyse what drives professional’s and companies’ decision making, and how this affects sustainable initiatives. The aim is to propose ways to increase the quality of sustainable decision making, and thus the likelihood of success. The learnings are translated to practical guidelines a SME should consider for executing their business in the most sustainable way, and form a base for further applied research on sustainable business behaviour towards a circular economy.
