Innovation as social processes

This book is about innovation processes. It is based on a 4-year participative study of technological R & D in the Norwegian petroleum company Statoil. The study indicates that common approaches to innovation fail to capture the fluid, complex and situational properties of ongoing processes, and therefore leave us with the impression that innovation can be designed and controlled. What such perspectives tend to ignore, is that innovation is the outcome of direct and indirect relations between many people attending to their responsibilities at work, implicitly involving communicative aspects such as power, control, meaning and identity. Therefore, innovation should be seen neither as designable courses of action, nor as events evolving by chance, but rather as an phenomenon emerging in everyday social interactions. In order to move our understanding of innovation processes in organizations ahead, it is therefore necessary to turn our attention in innovation research away from the quest for factors which stimulate or suppress innovation towards exploring the self-organizing, emerging nature of communicative interaction in terms of ongoing everyday activity in organizations.