Sammendrag
One of the ongoing research questions in the field of innovation is why some organizations are more innovative than others. This is not only about the creation of innovation, but also about how innovation affects business performance. The association between innovation and competitive advantage is not very well understood and has predominantly been subjected to theoretical debate. There is little research reported from the ?inner life? of large business organizations directed towards understanding innovation in terms of everyday organizational activity. In this paper we make accounts from such a research initiative conducted in cooperation with the Norwegian petroleum company Statoil ASA. In order to make sense of our experiences and observations, we suggest that the concept of innovation needs to be re-defined, explored and explained in ways deviating from traditional thinking. We argue that the understanding of social interaction in relation to innovation in organizations is not adequately dealt with in established theory. In pursuing this, we turn our attention to the research done on complexity in organizations, in particular the relevance of the theory of complex responsive processes, as outlined in a number of publications in recent years. Drawing on the perspective of complex responsive processes, we regard innovation as the result of a number of activities closely inwrought in every¬day organizational life, and suggest that innovation capacity may emerge as a result of competent approaches to relational phenomena in organizational contexts.
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