simple organizations, complex practitioners
This project is based on funding from the European Union for strengthening innovation and innovative environments. Hm… might not be the most expected introduction to a blog post on grassroots innovation, but that is what is going on. The thing is that when strengthening innovation, grassroots innovation is the perfect phenomena to understand innovation in the context of networked society.
In the discourse of innovation we see new stuff popping up to illustrate this: user driven innovation, open innovation, social innovation, democratic innovation, cultural innovation.
What is going on is this:
“What is needed instead is a framework around a heterarchy of strategies. The locus of decision making is no longer hierarchical and corporate, business and functional strategies are far more interdependent and interlinked than they have been in the past” (Chakravarthy and Henderson, 2007)
If we look into more research on grassroots innovation there historically seems to be an orientation towards development (sustainability, social change, NGO’s, citizenship) or technical system development (open source, crowdsourcing).
But what Chakravarthy and Henderson show is that strategies for innovation needs to be around av framework of heterarchy. This has been done in the context of organizations or urban planning. Some reseach point to changes in the relation between structure and agent, like Pina and Rego (2010) that ask for “simple organizations, complex practitioners”.
A re-thinking of the triple helix-thesis seem to be especially important for business within the creative/cultural industries.
