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There is a growing pressure for innovation in the public sector. Research on innovation suggests a new role for organizations, from a producer of predefined goods and services to a facilitator of co-creation and new forms of network-based governance. Previous research is mostly focused on the need for organizations to collaborate across sectors (inter-organizational) to promote innovation, less on the need for collaboration across local governments different departments (intra-organizational) but also across smaller units (inter-departmental). The aim is to explore how internal conditions affect a municipality’s innovation capability. 

This is done through a study based on interviews with departmental managers. The study reveals a heterogenic organizational environment where managing is situated and intra-departmental on the expense of inter-departmental and intra-organizational collaborations. The study also reveals that the situation is created by established practices, processes and structures which do not promote inter-departmental collaborations and thus does not build intra-organizational innovation capabilities.

I det här kapitlet belyses samverkan från dimensionerna uppåt (med Tillväxtverket för att söka nya samverkansformer med högskoleaktörer), utåt (mellan projekt vid andra högskolor/universitet), inåt (mellan olika delar av akademin och olika delar av högskolan) och nedåt (mot studenter, vilket kom att utvecklas under projektets gång).

Utgångspunkten för detta exempel på samverkan och samproduktion är ett treårigt pilotprojekt för att etablera entreprenörskap inom vård- och omsorgsutbildningar. Projektet startade 2012, pågick till och med 2014 och ingick i ett av Tillväxtverket finansierat pilotprogram tillsammans med fyra andra lärosäten (se Samverkan i projektet nedan). Pilotprojektet har dessutom identifierat tre samverkansinriktningar: explorerande samverkan (bygga ny kunskap tillsammans), expanderande samverkan (engagera fler i värdeskapande aktiviteter) och evolverande samverkan (ömsesidig kontinuerlig anpassning). I analysen och diskussionen återkommer denna kategorisering. Utöver detta diskuteras relationen mellan styrning och koordination samt hur skillnader i målsättningar bör påverka upplägget för samverkan och samproduktion.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. With 11 international and comparative case studies, it offers a unique exploration of the contemporary role of affect in academic labour and the organisation of scholarship and explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical potential of space in relation to organizational co-operations and to probe what kind of ideas the use of the space concept brings forward applied on an empirical material. We do this by analyzing the habits of thought through which public servants in four different public organizations construct their organizations abilities for co-operation. Showing that they perceive their organizations as different, threatened and important based on their experiences of previous co-operations, we propose that such constructs contribute to their “empty space”-understanding of co-operations; i.e. their idea that it is difficult to overcome spaces created in-between co-operating organizations. Shifting the focus from the organizations participating in the cooperation, to the joint organizing of actions will enable us to redefine experienced difficulties as potential generative spaces, we argue, which creates better conditions for successful co-operation.

With the aim to help innovation researchers choose outlets for articles based on participat- ory and action research methods, this article describes and discusses publication patterns of action research. A bibliographic study of 33 innovation journals ranked 4, 3, 2, and 1 in the 2018 Academic Journal Guide is complemented by a case study of this journal, the Technology Innovation Management Review, as an example of an established open access journal in the field with a wider scope and target group. From these two studies, we learn that the overall trend is towards more publications of action research articles in a diversity of outlets. Indirectly, the study supports the general view that articles striving towards adding practical relevance to research are becoming more frequent. There is no support for the notion that more renowned and higher-ranked journals would be more hesitant to accept articles with action research methods. The study also notes that there are interesting outlets beside those highly ranked and indexed in more conventional ways. The conclusion reached is that we lack a clear answer to the question of what are the best outlets for those of us who are interested in both innovation and action research. Instead, the study invites us to reflect upon what kind of impact we want to have and then act accordingly.

Through associations evoked by the lyrics from Leonard Cohens song First we take Manhattan, the paper explore what public values are created in a co- creation processes between actors within a public organization and a coordinating researcher representing a university. Data for the paper comes from a project for researching collaborative innovation in a municipality as well as experiences made by the author in three interlinked roles as researcher, project manager and finally as process manager for sustainable development projects involving the university and public partners.

Four types of public values have been identified through the associative structuring approach. They are relational values, knowledge values, change values, and symbolic public values. The tension between these co-created public values reveal that existing organizational hierarchical power structures are ever present. Public values that correspond to dominating official agendas of the collaborating organizations are quite noticeable in the empirical account. Proof of the success of a formal collaboration between the university and its partners, are valued and asked for. Coordination thus favours constructions of implicit symbolic public values, where mediated symbols of the structures, processes and results appear as preferred outcomes.

The study thus mainly reveals public values associated with what is good for the people, but not so much what is valued by the people. Complementary practical contributions that more directly could be valued by the people, when and where researchers and public professionals build relations and knowledge in order to enhance the public organizations ability to deliver public value, are given less attention.

As a complementary contribution to method, the article introduces and discuss the pros and cons of associative structuring, that has been used in order to evoke an autoethnographic account of the researcher’s experiences of the collaboration.

This paper is a call for a new research agenda for the topic of intelligence studies as a scientific discipline counterbalancing the present domination of research in the art of intelligence or intelligence as a practice. I argue that there is a need to move away from a narrow perspective on practice to pursue a broader understanding of intelligence as an organizational discipline with all of its complexities where the subject is seen more critical and is allowed to reflect on itself as a topic. This path will help intelligence academics connect to theoretical developments gained elsewhere and move forward, towards establishing more of an intelligence science. The article is a critic of what the author sees as a constructionist line of thinking. Instead the author presents a theory of intelligence as learning how to “muddle through” influenced more by organizational theory. The author also argues for an independent scientific journal in Intelligence [article was originally presented in 2009, before the appearance of JISIB].

This paper is a call for a new research agenda for the topic of intelligence counterbalancing the present domination of research in the art and function of intelligence. Pursuing this path will help the intelligence academics connect to theoretical developments gained elsewhere and move towards establishing an intelligence science.

With collaborative innovation as main theoretical base the paper discusses current insights from an ongoing municipal project on how to organize for social sustainability. The research rests on a participatory design, where the main empirical material for this paper consists of interviews and discussions with a development projects group members and group managers. The study concludes that the project do not fulfil the requirements for collaborative innovation so far, but instead gives an example for how public organizations can create local coordination across structures. Reasons for this limited advance is, according to the themes of this study, a diverging understanding of organizational needs between organizational levels, lack of priority and support, influence from existing structures and, most vital, a demarcation to involve only personel from public organization at the core of the project. In all, the project has come to handle social sustainability as an organizational problem rather than a societal problem where many other actors more naturally would be involed. There are though advances that partly move into the direction of collaborative innovation, where the paper ends with some reflection upon how this can be achieved. From the process of analysing the paper also have used the division between outer flexibility and inner flexibility as well as verbal priority and action priority, which are presented as candidate theoretical contributions.

The myth of the rational flow - A study of how environmental analysis and intelligence work create organizational direction in knowledge intense business milieus The unit of study, organized intelligence work, is known under several names like business intelligence, competitive intelligence, and business environment analysis; in this study viewed as dedicated activities that are carried out inside an organization to manage insights into the relationship between the organization and its environment. The author argues that the prevailing research tradition is scientifically underdeveloped as it is biased towards a practical tradition - limiting understanding of the subject to issues mainly of efficiency. The tradition thus fails to address questions that would help us to better understand what this phenomenon actually does to organizations and the people involved, not to mention business and society as we know them. The circumscribed theoretical foundation has called for an explorative study with strong inductive characteristics, in the pursuit of fulfilling the research objective to describe and make visible the phenomena of organized intelligence work and investigate how these activities relate to questions of organizational management and decision-making. The major contributions of the thesis are empirically grounded descriptions and analysis of organized intelligence work, a complementary model of the intelligence generating process, a thorough empirically and theoretically grounded critique of today’s favored theories and concepts, and finally a description of how organized intelligence work creates organizational direction as agents for an ideal organizational thinking. The thesis ends with an English summary over ten pages.

In the light of a public dissatisfaction with organizational practices associated with new public management, new organizational forms and processes are sought after. In a Swedish municipality, aiming at establishing new working patterns for achieving social sustainability, a pilot project has been launched in order to challenge existing preferred ways of organizing. Parallel a research project follows this development, where the aim of this paper is to extract insights from the study as well as discuss public organization.

The research follows a participatory action approach, here described as Multi-Level Participatory Action Research (MLPAR), where this paper sums up a period of building relationships and knowledge in a multi-levelled organization. The material has been collected through complementary methods including a longitudinal recorded and transcribed discussion with two project managers, reoccurring discussions with strategists, semi-structured interviews with eight project members as well as document analysis.

The results indicate that there is a movement towards something post NPM that for this project can be labelled as seeking collaborative innovation for social sustainability, but that the municipality’s present organization and processes hinders more profound changes. This movement could be ascribed a current interest in ideas associated with NPG, but as the study reveals that new organizational forms are sought for without any clear directives, a more careful stance towards the NPG label is called for. What instead is most prominent in the study is the explorative movement towards new organizational forms, where an empirical grounded label for what actually can be observed, like New Public Organizing (NPO), would be more accurate. The new label also opens up for new perspectives on public organizations where collaborating for public values is given more attention at the expense of governing issues.

Taking a collaborative approach to building society rests on an idea of reciprocity but also a need to submerge once own interests for common goals that are defined within diverse relationships at the rim of the municipal organization. This does not comply well with central ideas of NPM, such as clarity and control, which for this project creates tension with current structures not to say dominating ideas of what a municipality is and how it should work. Looking more freely upon the creation of public values, beyond what public organizations can contribute with, the article suggest that we should more carefully study different Coordinators for Public Values (CPV). The search for new organizational forms in building public good and public values, visible through the project, also raises questions about how we define democracy. Current democratic procedures and power structures might need to adapt to a new ideological landscape where values about e.g. social sustainability is allowed to influence not only elections but maybe even more profoundly guide a reorganization of the role and function of municipalities.

Society changes makes new demands on internal services and functions that can help various decision makers and others to not only make informed decisions but also coordinate the decisions and actions taken with the rest of the organization. In knowledge based companies this demand expands the managerial dimension of a firm to other people and processes, so that the knowledge developed and applied is informed and coordinated. These types of assignments are now given to intelligence services and intelligence personnel inside business organizations, with their tradition of monitoring and analysing the environment, and constitute new vistas for organized intelligence work (Hoppe, 2009). In this paper I use Burkes pentad to give an account of some important challenges encountered by intelligence personnel in modern business organizations due to the on-going industrial renewal and an increasing dependence on different knowledge processes. With the support from five different cases I claim that:

• The intelligence mission has changed from being a passive information service working on the command of high-ranking decision makers to an active internal agent for better business.
• Hierarchical position does not determine where intelligence is to be found. Instead the deployment of intelligence work comes from dispersed needs displayed in each unique subpart of an organization.
• Intelligence work moves away from the creation of intelligence artefacts to the creation of analytical conversations and the advocacy of distinct reference points in these conversations.
• Intelligence is personalized in two dimensions, firstly the analyst comes forth as an individual agent with a personal network, and secondly the intelligence produced is adapted to the individuals and the specific situation at hand.

The article provides a historic perspective and an overview of policy and practice affecting entrepreneurship education today with a special focus on the recent development in Sweden.

When entrepreneurship policy is being implemented in the Swedish educational system, the main effect on entrepreneurship education seems to be growth in an alternative view on entrepreneurship as foremost a means for accomplishing learning through action and practice. The implementation tends to favour the entrepreneurial learning concept over the entrepreneurship concept; where entrepreneurial learning encompasses a multitude of educational practices for developing internal entrepreneurship and enterprising abilities. External entrepreneurship for business venturing is not given priority. The thought tradition withheld in Business schools thus has had little influence on the implementation in Swedish primary and secondary school. Instead, new ideas on entrepreneurship are created outside the business context through experimentation in school teaching practices, where one also can spot an emerging research interest from pedagogy scholars.

Purpose – This article aims to focus on a perspective on knowledge that carries with it a most urgentchallenge for educational actors to engage in personal knowledge processes wherever they take place.

Design/methodology/approach – The purpose is met through the use of philosophical argumentationand theoretical ideas developed for understanding knowledge creation. Central concepts are Ba and‘‘knowledge activists’’, but also personal insights in relation to technical knowledge.

Findings – The author argues that educational actors who do not want to be marginalised must stepforward as knowledge activists, gaining access to and influencing all sorts of interpretative places (Bas),whether they are physical, virtual or mental, where information is interpreted to become knowledge.

Practical implications – Educational actors who want to continue playing an important societal rolehad better leave behind the idea of knowledge as something to be handled mainly in physical places.Instead they have to search for a position in the world of virtual spaces that is forming today.

Social implications – With the introduction of the internet and the emergence of a ‘‘cloud’’, civil societyis in desperate need of educational actors who can interlink the disparate Bas now forming, thusgenerating common ideas that can keep us together as a society and defend basic democratic ideals.

Originality/value – Through the use of a few well-established theoretical concepts the article showsthat there is a desperate need for rethinking education from being something limited in time and place tosomething that is ever present in knowledge processes of all kinds.

The article provides a historic description of how the entrepreneurship concept has developed and now through political initiatives is closing in on higher education. By providing different reference points the article shows that entrepreneurship is not bound to economics and business but instead display divergent meanings depending on context. The article discuss how governmental initiatives, following the policy development in EU and Sweden, has made entrepreneurship a highly contemporary issue for university staff but where the exact meaning of the term is obscured, leaving us unsure of the political agenda driving the implementation. What kind of change the on-going promotion of entrepreneurship in higher education will lead to is thus still to be revealed where the ambiguity of the term together with connotations of success and progression makes it hard to resist. University staff is therefore encouraged to reading up on the concept, where the article provides a short introduction that might serve as a start.

As society and business is becoming more complex, the creation and management of knowledge attracts more attention. For intelligence research it offers an alternative perspective on the art and science of intelligence that challenges a previous dominance of strategy and decision-making theories. The article is based on semi-structured interviews with intelligence personnel in four different multinational companies. Through the use of Burke’s pentad this article gives an account of important challenges encountered by intelligence personnel in modern business organizations due to an increasing dependence on different knowledge processes. These challenges are summarized in four central tasks for knowledge activists; that is to initiate and focus knowledge creation, to reduce the time and cost needed for knowledge creation, to leverage knowledge creation initiatives throughout the corporation and to guide knowledge creation by the instigation of complementary reference points. By engaging in these types of activities intelligence workers are able to stage and influence different sorts of analytical conversations, where the insights from these conversations as reformed knowledge govern an evolving strategy in dispersed circumstances. Thus, intelligence workers fulfil their purpose, which in this perspective can be viewed as creating better business in whatever process they engage in.

The article introduces the Prime Mover Matrix as a conversation piece that will help management build strategic innovation capacity and gain desired influence on industrial standards and thus power. After all, just because a company calls itself innovative and invests in R&D does not mean it is actually innovative. To be strategically innovative means that a company deliberately builds its technical innovative capacity and business innovative capacity in relation to the influence of other actors’ actions and innovations. By doing this, a company will be able to increase its influence on industrial standards and gain the necessary power to reach its objectives. It is a relative position towards a moving target, which is why companies must continuously change through learning. This means that management needs help to reflect on how their own company’s innovative capacity compares to their competitors, and they must unceasingly steer their capacity towards the desired innovation position. Today, we lack intuitive and usable tools that will facilitate strategic conversations on how to best invest for desired innovation capacity. In order to fill this void, this article proposes the Prime Mover Matrix: a model that functions as a conversation piece for triggering an assessment of an industry’s technical, business, and prime movers.

This article, just like innovation processes, revolves around ideas; ideas that has to be instigated, developed and put to use before they become organizational and societal innovations. Innovation ideas are in this respect quite complex and contextual. At the same time, the symbol commonly used for depicting ideas is quite simple and generic - a light bulb. Even though we are satisfied with the current situation, we might ask ourselves how would a communicative idea symbol fit for innovation look like? Symbols are adopted through a process of social consent. In that perspective, it appears pointless to challenge current use in order to replace the light bulb. The aim of the article is though not thus. Instead, it is to start a research dialogue on current use of preferred symbols for organizational innovation. The article describes how ideas are developed at the rim of formal organizations before penetrating the boundary getting in; and secondly how ideas need to penetrate the boundary of the organization getting out at launch. Hence, innovation can be viewed as a process of developing ideas in order to penetrate membranes. The article suggests a new symbol for ideas as “enlightened paths on a black orb”

A gap between theories used in business and theories used in research on business implies that theories used by one side are not viewed as relevant or interesting enough for the other side, and one may not only ask why but also if we can do something about it? Building on a participative perspective and collaborative innovation the paper stress a more open approach in order to collaborate on theories in constant change – open theories, written in open collaboration, where the paper has been given the following aim: To provoke reflection on how we through an open approach can make better use of theory.

The paper draws from theories of knowledge activism (Nonaka, Toyama, & Konno, 2000; Nonaka, Von Krogh, & Voelpel, 2006) for initiating and driving a collaborative activity of open theorizing encompassing abstracting, generalizing, relating, selecting, explaining, synthesizing, and idealizing (Weick, 1995). Through knowledge activism and responses to a mutual problem an interlinked knowledge space (cf. "ba" in Nonaka et al., 2000) will emerge, consisting of complementary problems, stories and ideas on how to handle and think about a problem. Open theory texts, constructed in this process will, just like the expanding communicative knowledge space they are built through, be in motion, in perpetual reconstruction, and consist of mutable association patterns around a theme, thus defining them as both theories and ideas in the public domain.

The quality of open theory is more concerned with the usability of a text than its validity as it is traditionally defined; usable in the sense that it liberates us from ideas and other structures that binds us to a problem; helping us to think better about business. The practice and theories created in open collaboration will be especially suitable for emancipatory knowledge interests in line with Habermas ([1968] 1972) reasoning on critical social sciences, giving them a different epistemological status than traditional theories on business. If our knowledge interest is to free ourselves from structures, a text that helps us in this process is more useful than one that do not. By doing this we will be moving away from a debate between how we know and what we know towards theories on how we can free ourselves from our problems by thinking better through provoked reflection.

The process will in time create a common language for business and research on business, favouring more central concepts for different open theories, thus also closing the gap between business and academia. Some concepts and ideas of an open theory will be temporarily stabilized, indicating a more profound reference point in that theory, whereas others change quicker, indicating less relevance or flaws.

The text ends with a first sketch of the Open Theory logic as well as reflections on this logic and suggestions for how to proceed from here.

Organizations suffer not just from myopia, but also from structural and cultural inertia that makes them more reactive than active, which also hinders them from becoming fully effective. One way of explaining this is to use Simon’s (1945) ideas about how individuals are bounded in certain structures of rationality, and expanding them into areas of bounded attention and bounded interpretation. The article discusses how intelligence can be viewedas a tool for counteracting these drawbacks.

The paper is guided by the question of how public organizations can adapt to include citizens as co-producers of public values. To answer it, eleven researchers and civil servants, all involved in the transformation of a collaborative platform encompassing a university and four different public organizations, formed a collaborative and boundary-spanning author. Building on personal expertise and situated organizational experiences we conclude that public organizations do not adapt except for specific confined areas where they can still control and command outcomes important to them. Hence, public organizations struggle to become co-producers of new public values. From the process, we also conclude that academics and civil servants together writing an academic article cannot be viewed as a fertile common ground for equal collaboration and co-production. Nevertheless, it might still work as an interesting boundary-spanning activity for arriving at shared understandings and important insights on for instance why organizational moves from intended to actual involvement appear difficult.

Arbetet som ligger till grund för den här rapporten har gjorts inom Samverkansprojektet vilket är ett forskningsprojekt som initierats som en del av Samhällskontraktet (SK) och dess delprocess Hållbar samhällsutveckling (HSU). Både SK och HSU är organisatoriska samverkansytor för Västerås stad, Eskilstuna kommun, Region Västmanland, Landstinget Sörmland och Mälardalens högskola.

Samverkansprojektet har pågått i tre år, mellan 2015 och 2017, i det gränsland som etablerats mellan akademin, våra offentliga samarbetsparter och invånarna, vilket förklarar titeln på rapporten. Vårt konkreta mål med forskningsprojektet har varit att ”utveckla modeller/begrepp som gör det lättare för våra intressenter att förstå de organisatoriska problem de står inför vad gäller att lösa samhällsproblemen de ansvarar för”.

För att nå målet har flera mindre studier men också andra aktiviteter genomförts. Våra resultat har successivt växt fram och de har också spritts, och fortsätter spridas, på kon­ferenser, seminarier och olika typer av möten likväl som i både akademiska och populära skrifter.

Våra resultat och erfarenheter presenteras även i denna rapports åtta bidrag, där vi med hjälp av skiftande perspektiv, modeller och begrepp resonerar kring hur samverkan bättre kan förstås och förbättras. Varje kapitel avslutas med rubriken ”Läs mer” där den som vill fördjupa sig i det som tagits upp ges tips om vidare läsning. Rapporten sätter punkt för forskningsprojektet genom att formulera lättillgängliga texter som bygger på olika delar av vårt forskande och samverkande arbete.

Formen har vi valt för att bidra till ett gemensamt reflekterande hos dig och dem som du vill prata om samverkan med. Istället för färdiga svar, som man ofta hittar som resultat eller slutsatser i mer traditionella rapporter, vill vi att rapporten ska fungera som ett stöd till ett gemensamt utforskande och konstruktionen av gemensamma svar. Att undra tillsammans över problem med hjälp av det vi tar upp i den här rapporten, innebär en jämställd process där var och en bidrar med sitt perspektiv. Rapporten kan på detta sätt ses som ett verktyg för dig som arbetar med samverkan, kanske främst i offentlig sektor.

In this explorative essay, we ask how to integrate current development in entrepreneurship education with an education for societal transformation towards sustainability, more explicitly phrased as what and how educators should teach to make students develop transformative capabilities and build action competence for leading societal transformation. We conclude that entrepreneurship education has much to offer and that educators and students ought to transgress institutional borders and explore wilderness together to learn how to create transformative leadership education. Current knowledge indicates that a purposeful education for this end should address seven complementary competencies where students learn to take action, collaborate, engage with society, manage own growth, ground themselves, scout the future, and reframe the system. Due to its inherent qualities, entrepreneurship education, built on engagement in real-world transformative problems, can be considered the most potent foundation for such aspirations. However, as current educational institutions are formed by the malfunctioning and unsustainable system they serve, today's institutions might not be the best forerunners of change in any pedagogical practice. This is why we also conclude that progressive educators need to leave their ivory towers, classrooms, and lecture halls behind and engage in real transformative problems head-on with their students by their sides.

In this essay we explore some central societal and educational problems that educators ought to address in order to support sustainability and we argue the need for educating transformative entrepreneurial selves, that is, students with abilities to muster and organize resources pursuing a cause. The current situation calls for youth to develop entrepreneurial competences that will give them the means to introduce and drive change through individual action. In so doing, we put forward the concept of entrepreneurship for a cause to challenge more traditional ideas of what entrepreneurship encompasses. For education, we subsequently suggest using the concept of entrepreneurship education for a cause. We argue that entrepreneurship education has an important role to play as an enabler, but one in which individual self-interests connected to business venturing are given less attention than reflections upon how each individual through decisive action can support the creation of a more sustainable society. Central to our argument is the insight that new ideas about meaning in life that will support changing society away from consumption towards sustainability need to be added as a leading dimension in any education with the aspiration of transforming the world through the actions of its students.

What makes an academic? Is it their unyielding devotion to research and teaching, their tendency towards a hermitic existence? Or does it have more to do with their socioeconomic privilege and racial profile? Are academics today any different from what society has always known them to be? How homogenous is the group of academics? Historically, academia was populated by men from the upper classes, often somewhat similar to each other. Over time, structures and procedures were established to ensure both scientific quality and academic exclusion. This chapter deconstructs the myths surrounding academics and the lives they lead within academia. Through shards of broken mirrors is the reader encouraged to look at a group of misfits that are the odd one out in most academic contexts that defy common classifications. Misfits that would like to devote only 40 working hours to academia instead of their whole being. Misfits that use the “wrong” theoretical lenses, unpopular methods, or undesirable contexts. Misfits that don't fit in by matter of race, ethnicity, sex, or social economic class. Misfits that have found their misfitting family and hold on for dear life.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present and develop models of educational approaches to entrepreneurship that can provide complementary analytical structures to better study, enact and reflect upon the role of entrepreneurship in higher education.

Design/methodology/approach

A general framework for entrepreneurship education is developed by using theory as well as practical experiences from the fields of business, engineering and pedagogy. The paper is mainly conceptual where the unfolding Swedish practice is used as contextual backdrop.

Findings

The FOR/IN/THROUGH/ABOUT (FITA) taxonomy is presented and used to develop three models of how to approach entrepreneurship in higher education depending on purpose. As there exists a didactical divide between entrepreneurial education for business and entrepreneurial approach to teaching and learning, educators and researchers ought to let their specific context influence the adoption of the taxonomy as well as the presented models.

Research limitations/implications

The differentiations suggested by the presented models can be used to both structure the designs and limit claims of future research. More heuristic research is called for.

Practical implications

The use of FITA in the designing of entrepreneurship education offers new opportunities for enhancing complementary student learning in higher education.

Social implications

The study suggests that any political or scholarly initiative must acknowledge the diversity of entrepreneurship education and chose different approaches depending on what is to be achieved.

Originality/value

The multidisciplinary approach has made it possible to present and create models that denote a common ground for a productive discussion on how to better understand and make use of entrepreneurship in higher education.

Entreprenöriella kompetenser är viktiga för livslångt lärande, och flera politiska initiativ har tagits för att påverka utbildningssystemet i Sverige och EU. Begrepp som entreprenörskap och entreprenöriellt lärande översätts nu till pedagogiska sammanhang och bildar högaktuella teman i utbildningsdebatten. Det här kapitlet belyser entreprenöriellt lärande samt framväxten av den didaktiska praktik som utvecklas inom utbildning med koppling till entreprenörskap. I beskrivningen skiljer vi på ett snävt synsätt på lärande inriktat mot affärsverksamhet och ett brett synsätt för generellt lärande. Vi presenterar även en taxonomi för att skilja på olika typer av entreprenörskapsutbildningar.

Through this special issue we sought to publish articles that will help us better understand how academia and practice can work together through new and contemporary accounts of “action research” and its close relative “participatory action research”, which stresses the mutuality of the approach.

There is a growing interest in both employee-driven innovation (EDI) and innovation in welfare services, but a lack of empirical studies addressing innovation from the employee perspective.

Accordingly, this study was designed to contribute with well-grounded empirical knowledge, aiming

to explore the barriers to and opportunities for participation in innovation experienced by employees of the Swedish welfare services. In order to reach the aim, a qualitative thematic analysis of

27 semi-structured interviews with employees in four municipalities was performed.

The study identified three main themes, with a great impact on the innovative performance of the studied organizations: support, including leadership and innovation processes; development, including creativity and learning; and organizational culture, which includes attitudes and communication, all essential ingredients in EDI. Experienced barriers for innovation were unclear or non-existing innovation processes with ambiguous goals, insufficient learning, and deficient organizational slack, thus creating a tension between day-to-day work and innovation and hindering reflection and exploration.

Attitudes of colleagues and lack of communication were also barriers to implementing innovation, suggesting the need for better management support for a communicative and open culture.

Opportunities were found, including commitment to innovation and willingness to try new ideas, but the employees must be given the mandate and sufficient time to develop the potential that emerges from continuous learning, time for reflection, and user dialogue. The conclusion was that incremental innovations existed, but the full potential of these did not benefit the entire organization due to inadequate communication and lack of innovation processes.

The study improves our understanding of how employees regard their involvement in innovation.

It also discusses how to make better use of employees’ resources in innovation processes andcontributes to important knowledge about EDI in the public sector. On the basis of our results, we suggest a model of EDI for use in practice.

Research on public sector innovation is still limited, and increased knowledge of innovation processes is needed. This article is a based on a study of the implementation of innovation policies in Swedish municipalities, and gives a first-hand, empirical view of some of the complexities of innovation in the public sector. The study took place in four municipalities in central Sweden. The municipalities varied in size and organisational forms. Interviews and policy documents were used for data collection.The results showed that the innovation policies were not followed by action, which may be described as not mobilizing dynamic capabilities to create innovativeness. Thus, dynamic capabilities, such as learning and HRM, Human Resource Management, were not used in conjunction with innovation. Particularly amongst senior management there was a negative attitude towards the innovative capacity of their organization. Middle management saw possibilities. However, barriers such as extensive control systems removed the focus from innovation. There was a lack of communication between senior management and middle management regarding innovation. The conclusion was that innovation, as both concept and practice, was not fully embraced by the municipalities.

It is suggested that generative leadership, opening up communication within the organisations, especially between employees, could be beneficial, and that a common understanding and definition of the innovation concept is needed. Integration of top-down processes with bottom-up processes, such as employee-driven innovation, is also suggested.

The aim of the study is to explore the role of public welfare services expressed in theSwedish government’s innovation policy. The focus is on municipal and county services,such as education and health care. The study is based on an analysis of 55 documentsproduced by the government and its agencies. Although innovation policy is a major issue in Sweden, and Sweden has a large public sector, research on innovation within this fieldis very limited. The results show that the municipality and county services are visible ininnovation policy when they are a driving force for innovation in the private sector. Thisapplies especially when public procurement becomes a vehicle for business innovation.Innovation is not used as a concept representing radical change and general progress ofthe public sector as such. When municipal welfare services become visible in the studieddocuments, there are often references to a need for efficiency improvements and forprocurement leading to innovation. For the public sector, including local welfare services, no coherent innovation policy is present, but this study found elements that could becomepart of an innovation policy. Policy development is important for the future, consideringthe public sector´s role in the important and increasing service sector and in the society as a whole.