https://www.mdu.se/

In the face of continuous transformations in organisations, technological advancements directly impact the practice of professionals who need to (re)imagine and (re)shape their roles, workflows, and contexts. To navigate these uncertainties and collaboratively explore alternative futures, we present a collaborative method to stage hybrid design futures in organisational settings. We tested the method in a five-workshop journey in a Swedish public academy for competence development that trains healthcare practitioners such as doctors, midwives, nurses and dentists, among others. The findings and outcomes from workshops are presented in the light of a combined analytical framework of hybrid design futures. The collaborative method engaged participants to be active creators during workshops by creating physical models representing their future scenarios, writing speculative stories about their future roles, enacting ideas from their speculative fictions, and making low-fidelity prototypes of potential technological applications in their future workplace. The results suggest that the collaborative method helped participants develop their sense of agency to change and shape their futures within the organisation. The findings indicate that participants became more aware of technological roles, their capacity to own their futures, and the need to collaborate with other departments within the organisation.

The thesis argues for a humanistic and democratic approach to innovation management that puts employees and their engagement in the center of organizational efforts for innovation. It proposes that a culture for innovation can be built by enabling all employees to develop their innovative practice as part of their everyday work and not as an extra activity on top of their existing responsibilities. The aim of this approach to innovation is to build more human-centered organizations that help employees improve their own motivation, creativity, well-being, and self-fulfillment at work. This presupposes that they need to be able to connect with their body, feelings, fantasy, intuition, and will, and to be able to innovate more from within, balancing external expectations from management and users with their own personal needs. Since there is a lack of discussing embodied aspects of knowledge and learning in connection to innovative competence in the current innovation management literature, knowledge and methods from contemporary dance and choreography are explored to support a more holistic approach to innovative competence development. Based on integrating research from both innovation management and contemporary dance fields, a model of innovative practice in everyday work is developed. The model suggests what kind of skills and activities can enable employees develop their personal innovative practice that is adjusted to their work context and their specific needs. It is proposed that as employees practice innovating in everyday work, they will slowly move from innovating incrementally towards developing the competence for more radical innovation. Different practical tools and exercises for enabling innovative competence development that were inspired by choreographic practices, and adjusted and tested in organizational context are described. Ideas around how contemporary dance and choreography can be used to design and implement long-term art-based interventions in organizations that can create value on strategic level are proposed.  The research approach used in the thesis is participatory action research done by several iterative cycles between practice and theory. Two empirical and two theoretical studies that were part of the research process are presented. The empirical studies were implemented in the Eskilstuna municipality and at the Art of Management and Organization conference. The theoretical studies were performed in the fields of innovative competence and contemporary dance and choreography. 

The article introduces some of the concepts from experimental contemporary dance and choreography, such as “body and materiality”, the “method of practice”, and “undoing everydayness”, that have not been addressed much in the “dance and organization” theory. It expands the application of dance methods from the predominant field of leadership practice towards the innovation management and development of innovative competence of employees in organizations. The concept of “body and materiality” suggests that employees could focus more on engaging the body and materiality when innovating in order to balance the external drivers of innovation (such as market trends, user needs, and increase of shareholder value) with their own needs, desires and well-being, but also to make use of the vast possibilities of embodied knowledge that is often excluded from innovation processes. The “method of practice” proposes to give more attention to the process rather than just the performance or result of innovating, using methods, such as “doing less” to create more time to reflect, finding “meaningful questions” to innovate around, and using “improvisation” as a method to develop new ideas through the practice of spontaneous experimentation. It shifts the idea from using innovative competence to perform a desired effect through prescribed top-down innovation projects towards developing innovative practice through durational bottom-up exploration. “Undoing everydayness” hints that innovation can come closer to everyday work routines of all employees, by challenging existing norms and combining critical thinking with exploration of potentiality in everyday work. Concrete examples of activities through which these concepts were materialized in a choreographic intervention at the Art of Management conference 2016 are described and their potential to be applied in organizations discussed. 

The article presents a case of Swedish municipality to demonstrate how principles from contemporary dance and choreography can be used to design and implement long-term artistic interventions on strategic level and enable employees ́ innovative competence development. The study described is a 2-year participatory action research project with practice-based training for 22 innovation leaders from different parts of organization. The results show that dance-based methods enabled participants to develop different innovative skills and strengthened their innovative competence. Unique contributions of dance methods are highlighted with the focus on pro- viding a more humanistic and bottom-up approach to enabling innovation, balancing external organizational goals with the needs and drives of each individual. Choreographic tools provided an innovative frame of thinking about using body, movement, space and time in new ways in everyday work to enable individuals to feel better, develop their personal innovative practice and create conditions they need to be innovative. 

This conceptual article contributes to understanding of individual innovative competence by providing a comprehensive view of the concept, integrating different theories from innovation management into one model and linking it to the theory from studies of competence, where Illeris (2013) competence model is taken as the base. The contribution of this article is to fill the gap in existing innovation management theory where most researchers focus only on specific dimensions of innovative competence. The proposed integrated model of innovative competence was developed based on a systematic literature review, using the ISI Web of Knowledge database for Social Science domain between 1980-2016, and different combinations of words “individual” and “innovation” with terms “competence”, “behavior”, “skill”, “attitude” and “trait”, as search words. It shows how individuals need to combine different knowledge, personality traits, functional and interactive skills to demonstrate innovative behavior in practice. There is a certain ambidexterity or two-sidedness in the elements of innovative competence that enables individual to move between exploration of opportunities and generation of ideas on one hand, and implementation and exploitation of ideas on the other. The model can be used in different ways, both in teaching and in organizations. Teachers can use it as a reflection tool to increase understanding of innovative competence among students, but also as the basis for developing practice-based curriculum for strengthening innovative competence among students. Organizations can use the model both as a support in recruiting innovative talent, assessing and developing innovation as a core competence among employees, and when forming innovative teams. 

This book chapter describes some concepts and tools from contemporary dance and choreography that provide new insights about enabling innovation in organizations. A choreographic perspective of innovation process with four iterative stages (tuning-in, exploration, reflection and sharing) is presented as an alternative view to existing models in innovation management theory. It is shown how choreographic thinking about using body, space, time and composition was applied in an innovation process designed for a group of practitioners from different companies and public organizations. Positive effects and limitations of this approach are presented and questions for future research suggested.

In today´s fast changing global environment, organizations from both private and public sectors are under an increased pressure to continuously change and adapt in order to survive and provide meaningful services and products to their users. Innovation has therefore become an on-going effort that is not only a matter of R&D and product development departments, but rather a responsibility of all employees. To think how products, services, processes, methods and business models can be constantly improved or replaced by new ones is becoming a core competence needed across organization. While many organizations in Sweden have already developed a capability to innovate incrementally through continuous improvements, they often struggle to innovate radically by engaging the talent, knowledge and skills of all employees. In this thesis we thus look at how organizations could enable employees to strengthen their ability to innovate and move from incremental towards more radical innovation.

Insights from the practice of contemporary dance groups were used for inspiration, exploring how dancers work in their creative processes and what enables them to move from ideas towards developing a new performance. Since there is very limited literature about the connection between contemporary dance practice and organizational innovation, we tried to build our own framework based on empirical data. In the first study, 20 semi-structures interviews with choreographers from different countries were performed and a model with key phases, tools and enablers of innovation process from choreographic perspective developed. The model was then compared with innovation management theory and empirical data from the industry to identify similarities and differences between the innovation concepts and practice in dance and business. 

In the second study the model was tested in practice through participatory action research with 27 participants from different companies and public sector. The study explored how principles and methods from contemporary dance and choreography could be applied to enable innovation in organizational context and what are the effects and limitations of using knowledge from contemporary dance to enable innovation in organizations.

The main contribution of the research presented in this thesis is the conceptual framework about innovation process, tools and enablers from a choreographic perspective and a proposed practical method for applying it in organizational context which was developed as a part of the research. Several examples of how practitioners from business and public sector experienced dance-based methods and then translated them into their own working environment to support innovation are presented. 

Dagens snabbföränderliga och globala miljö sätter både privata och offentliga organisationer under ökad press att ständigt förändra och anpassa sig för att kunna överleva och erbjuda meningsfulla tjänster och produkter till sina användare. Innovation är därför en pågående insats som inte bara är en fråga för FoU och produktutvecklingsavdelningar, utan är istället ett ansvar för alla anställda. Att tänka på hur produkter, tjänster, processer, metoder och affärsmodeller kan bli bättre eller ersättas med nya, blir en kärnkompetens som behövs i hela organisationen. Samtidigt som många organisationer i Sverige redan utvecklat en förmåga att förnya sig stegvis genom ständiga förbättringar, kämpar de ofta med så kallad radikal innovation där talang, kunskap och kompetens från alla anställda involveras. I den här avhandlingen utforskas hur organisationer kan göra det möjligt för anställda att stärka sin innovationsförmåga, från att vara inkrementellt till att bli mer i enlighet med radikal innovation.

Insikter från samtida dansgrupper har använts för inspiration. Vi har studerat hur dansare arbetar i kreativa processer och vad som gör det möjligt för dem att gå från idéer till att utveckla ny föreställning. Eftersom det finns mycket lite litteratur kring sambandet mellan praxis inom samtida dans och innovation i organisationer, har vi sökt att bygga en egen modell utifrån empiriska data. I den första studien genomfördes 20 stycken semi-strukturerade intervjuer med koreografer från olika länder. Utifrån detta utvecklas en modell som innehåller viktiga faser, verktyg och möjliggörare i innovationsprocessen från ett koreografiskt perspektiv. Modellen har sedan jämförts med innovationsledningsteori och empiriska data från industrin för att identifiera likheter och skillnader när det gäller innovationskoncept och praxis, mellan samtida dans och näringslivet.

I den andra studien testades modellen i praktiken genom deltagarbaserad forskning med 27 representanter från olika företag och den offentliga sektorn. Studien undersökte hur principer och metoder från samtida dans och koreografi kan tillämpas för att möjliggöra innovation i organisatoriska sammanhang och vilka effekter och begränsningar som finns när det gäller att använda kunskap från samtida dans för att möjliggöra innovation i organisationer.

Det viktigaste bidraget till forskning som presenteras i denna avhandling är den konceptuella modellen av innovationsprocessen, verktyg och möjliggörare från ett koreografiskt perspektiv samt förslag på praktisk metod för att tillämpa den i organisatoriska sammanhang som har utvecklats som en del av forskningen. Flera exempel presenteras på hur verksamma i näringslivet och offentlig sektor upplevt dansbaserade metoder och sedan översatt dem till sin egen arbetsmiljö för att stödja innovation. 

Organizational culture is considered by several scholars to have a significant impact on the organization's capacity for innovation. However, there is little known about the specific aspects of organizational culture that facilitates radical innovation. This article investigates in what ways contemporary dancers ́ creative practice may contribute to our understanding as well as to the development of radical innovation in business. By interviewing twenty contemporary dancers and choreographers from different countries, we found five key elements that support their creative processes from idea to performance. These elements or categories are improvisation, reflection, personal involvement, diversity, and emergent supportive structures.

An interesting finding is the dancers ́ approach to work and their mindset, characterized by iteration between improvisation and reflection, rather than working with pre-planned goals and structures. We argue that this approach imprints their working environment and the culture for radical innovation emerges through their way of thinking, acting and relating. This study presents a systematic framework that will provide the basis for long- term strategic artistic interventions in business in order to enable cultural transformation towards radical innovation. 

This article argues that due to the highly competitive and fast changing global environment organizations today face an innovation challenge. They need to expand their competence for radical innovation beyond their R&D departments or special units and enable employees across organization to develop competence for both incremental and radical innovation. Since most innovation challenges today are too complex to be solved by individuals, they also need to learn how to enable innovation competence development in groups. Unfortunately there is a gap in existing literature between understanding innovation competence on individual level and on the other hand innovation capability on the quite abstract overall level of the firm. Results from a study of contemporary dance groups and a study of radical innovation initiatives in Japanese manufacturing companies are used in this article to develop a framework of key enablers for developing innovation competence in groups. The six enablers identified and described in the framework are: group collaboration and co-creation; emergent bottom-up, top- down process; training and practice; personal involvement; continuous iteration between exploration and reflection; and diversity of people, spaces and tools. The article also presents how the framework is currently being tested in practice at the Mälardalen University.