Innovation and action research

In the Western economies there is a growing focus on innovation as the key to economic growth. In spite of its orientation towards transcending the given, and creating something new, action research has so far played a limited role as a resource in innovation. Departing from practice-driven innovation and the need for collaboration between many actors, a key role for action research as promoter of joint inquiries in dialogical form and associated action is described and discussed, drawing on experiences from action research programmes in Scandinavia. The core challenge for action research is not only to promote certain forms of collaborative inquiry and action, but to reach a level of scale, or mass, that makes innovation possible. Keywords: Action research, innovation, dialogue, social constructivism Introduction As more and more mass production is moved out of the Western economies, these economies need to create products and services with a complexity and knowledge content that cannot easily be copied. This has brought the issue of innovation to the forefront, as the probably most important challenge these economies are facing. While innovation in the nineteenth century was largely done by practical people facing practical problems, the post World War II period came to see science as the most important driver in innovation processes. Science is supposed to perform the basic leaps forwards in knowledge; innovation is a question of applying, exploring or exploiting these leaps. This view on innovation as a "linear" process starting with science and ending with commercially relevant products and services has been questioned; in fact there are probably few issues that have been subject to more discussion in recent years. Since all actors, when they are facing the challenge of laying the ground for innovation, are looking for guidelines to the future, rather than interpretations of the past, one should expect action research to play an important role in these discussions. This form of research is, after all, a form that aims at structuring the actions of today so that they lead to certain outcomes in the future. In actual practice, the discourse on innovation contains few contributions from action research, and even fewer that gain recognition in the discourse. There are many explanations for this: one is that to introduce action research as relevant to a specific discourse is not only a question of arguing the positive benefits of this kind of research in the abstract. There is a need to specify, in concrete terms, how this kind of research actually can contribute. The purpose of this article is to describe and discuss one line of reasoning of relevance in this context, with associated examples. Practice driven innovation When Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA, the basic idea was to bring together two facts: (a) people do things in their homes (b) people have furniture in their homes. This idea emerged in a context as far removed from science as it was possible to come, at least in Sweden. The Smaland region has the lowest average level of formal education in the country, no institutions of higher learning and very little orientation towards formalised knowledge. It was, and still is, however, the most highly industrialised region, with more than 40 % of the workforce employed in industry. Among the industries, furniture is a major one. In the beginning it was the ability of this local industry to participate in the project that made the realisation of the idea possible. When this author had occasion to visit the region of Veneto in Northern Italy, as part of a delegation of representatives from the labour market parties in Norway, one of the cases to be presented was the Geox shoe company, perhaps the largest success in this field in recent years. The founder told how he, as a wine salesman with much walking to do, had started to wonder if it would be possible to make a shoe that could breathe through the sole. …