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Employee-Driven Innovation and Practice-Based Learning in Organizational Cultures

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Abstract

How can we understand employees as drivers of innovation and what prevents employees from being realized as an innovative capacity in organizations? The present definition of EDI contains a discrepancy: on the one hand, EDI is claimed to cover purely bottom-up processes, while, on the other hand, empirical examples show that EDI is dependent on a cultural context in which the employees’ everyday creative actions (based on practice-based learning) are recognized as potential resources for innovation in the organization. Due to the lack of a concept of organizational culture in relation to the analysis of employee-driven innovation, we are unable to grasp fully why attempts to be innovative sometimes fail, and, which is even more widespread, why practice-based potential innovation is never realized. In this chapter, we will thus improve our knowledge of why innovation must be recognized as practice-based in the organizational culture.

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© 2012 Ulrik Brandi and Cathrine Hasse

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Brandi, U., Hasse, C. (2012). Employee-Driven Innovation and Practice-Based Learning in Organizational Cultures. In: Høyrup, S., Bonnafous-Boucher, M., Hasse, C., Lotz, M., Møller, K. (eds) Employee-Driven Innovation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014764_7

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