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Innovation is desirable and many players, both individual and organized, as well as society at large, want to actively contribute to its development and to know its results. Increasingly complex but also controversial techniques are under development , new advanced technologies and services where we as individuals become increasingly coexistent with our machines and other artifacts, inside and outside our bodies.

The interaction and settlement between social and material things creates a context of complexity. This is about innovation processes characterized by a transformative character which, despite some overlaps and touch points, are not properly captured in the concepts and theories of disruptive / radical innovation or the more process-oriented innovation theories of transformative and systemic innovation. On a higher level, this dissertation aims at further developing the understanding of the innovation process through an in-depth description of how transformative innovation is formed, developed, implemented and generates effects in a complex social context. Based on the purpose, the research question is formulated: How does transformative innovation develop in complex contexts?

The dissertation takes a multidisciplinary approach by combining theories from the disciplines; innovation, business administration and sociology. The study can be seen as a contribution to the innovation technology discipline by considering innovation with an STS-inspired approach and introducing the translation perspective, transformation, action network, actor networks, space-time, actors and the collective. The process perspective has been studied over a long period of time between 2002-2016, through a case study on the development of the idea / concept "stem cell", with a major focus on embryonic and research at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, I have written my story from a theoretical and practical point of view. I highlight a process-methodological contribution in the form of innovation ethnography whose research role has practical implications for innovation management research.

I have observed how knowledge development and innovation development in practice are integrated and that innovation management is about to act proactively and reactively continuously. I have developed the concept of transformative innovation and present a model of a transformative innovation process in which complexity plays an important role. The complexity is found in and around the processes, which contributes to the creation of complex contexts and is therefore considered an important aspect of the transformative concept. The transformative is linked to the innovation process as a result of the transnational collective and its actors / actors constant changing because of their participation in the idea / concept development.

Keywords: Transformative innovation process, ANT, transnational collective, institutionalization, stem cells, KI, innovation ethnography.