ACCELERATING HIGH INVOLVEMENT: THE ROLE OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN ENABLING EMPLOYEE PARTICIPATION IN INNOVATION

Abstract

The experience of implementing employee involvement in innovation can be viewed as a bounded opportunity. Whilst long-term strategic benefits could flow from organising participation across the workforce, creating structures that sustain such a culture is highly complex. In effect the "transaction costs" of high involvement innovation limit its implementation. However a number of technological and social developments (such as innovation platforms and company social networks) offer new options in this space which may change this. In particular the "reach" and "richness" trade-off could be changed to permit higher levels of participation in larger-scale projects. Much depends on the ways in which implementation of systems deploying these new approaches is undertaken and the development of appropriate behavioural routines to support them. This paper explores a number of cases within German enterprises and reports early experience along this learning curve.