In the Netherlands, a new research role was introduced in higher professional education. In our lectureship participants improve their practices and generate knowledge as action researchers. We started our own action research to better help them. Our question is: how can we help our researchers develop their research identity as part of their professional development and so help them improve their innovation practice? Reflecting on our findings so far, we notice a pedagogy of increasing structure. We believe a research identity involves more than techniques; a research culture (and especially ethics) must be developed if research is to become a tradition.