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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.