"The Killing Fields" of innovation How to kill ideas

ABSTRACTThis paper points to seemingly contradicted processes of framing innovation, idea generation and killing ideas. It reports from a yearlong innovation project, where health care professionals explored problems and tested ideas for solutions, regarding a future downsizing of the case hospital. Theories in various ways describe the opening and closing phases of innovation. Exploration and idea generation opens a field of interest, which is then closed by making choices of ideas to further explore in the next opening phase. These choices deliberately kill a lot of ideas. In the innovation project, however, substantial amounts of relevant ideas got killed during opening phases, where the purpose of activities was framed as idea generation. These ideas were either verbally or silently killed, and some in rather contradicted ways: The design and facilitation of brain storming processes lead to clustering of ideas, a design strategy which seemed to kill unique ideas. The reframing of innovation as a radical endeavor killed learning from others for being not innovative. The findings of this paper supplement theories of deliberate killing of ideas by suggesting framing, design and facilitation of innovation as more subtle ways of killing ideas during opening phases.Key words: Health care, innovation, framing, design, facilitationIntroductionThis paper takes its departure in a field study of an innovation project in a Danish hospital. The fieldwork demonstrated seemingly contradictions between the purpose of innovation, the design and facilitation of idea generation and the killing of ideas. The Cambodian journalist Dith Pran originally coined the title analogy "The Killing Fields" after his escape from the communist Khmer Rouge regime to describe a number of sites in Cambodia, where large numbers of people were killed and buried.1 2 With humble respect of this genocide, "The Killing Fields" in this paper refer to innovation processes, where different kinds of ideas are discarded for obvious or more subtle reasons. The processes of supporting or undermining innovation in public service organization are less studied aspect of innovation processes (Hartley, 2006: 34). The purpose of the innovation project was to adapt new and better practices from across professional and organizational boundaries in the health care sector, to experiment with ideas from other contexts than health care and to generate new ideas for solutions. The innovation project was designed and facilitated as continuing divergent and convergent phases. Divergent phases were designed to open a field of interest through exploration and idea generation. Convergent phases aimed at closing the field of interest by making choices of ideas to explore in the next opening phase and so forth. Why then were substantial amounts of ideas killed during opening phases? This empirical wondering was the spark to analyze contradictions between innovation theories and practices in this paper. This approach to research is described by other researchers as using empirical mysteries as dialogue partner with theories and models in order to question, doubt and problematizing existing or dominant expectations and frameworks (Alvesson and Karreman, 2007). Initially, theories of innovation phases are reviewed in order to enable discussion of what kills ideas. Deliberate exnovation and individual and group dynamic explanations for killing ideas are supplemented by the concept of framing in order to address the often-contradicted problems and solutions in health care. The theory section is followed by an outline of the context and case, the field study and the methods for data collection and analyses. The analyses suggest that framing and design of innovation affects the killing of different types of ideas. The conclusion summarizes the findings and suggests implications for innovation research and facilitation.Promoting or killing ideasThis section reviews theories on promoting and killing ideas throughout innovation research. …