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Performative tools, enigmas and paradoxa

IMG_2971At this year’s CINet Conference in Stockholm, we presented some of our recent research findings to a community of innovation management scientists and practitioners. Bettina Minder evoked quite some interest with her case study on how the use of performative tools supported collaborative learning across knowledge domains, i.e. science and practice, at last years’s Future Forum Lucerne. She explained how such methods and tools open up and create new spaces for dialog.

Patricia Wolf pointed to a blind spot in management research – commons-based open design business models. Activities in collaborative maker user communities promise value co-creation strategies in relation to the entire value ecosystem, in particular to all contributors. Such claims potentially point to new business models that go beyond what is called open business models because they are commons-based. Community-based business models were so far not in the focus of management studies, they constitute an enigma.

Together with Barbara Kummler, Patricia Wolf also presented the findings from the CreaLab survey on interdisciplinary teams in companies in Switzerland.  The findings from this survey indicate several paradoxes: According to the respondents, clear organizational structures, autonomy and diversity are important for interdisciplinary teamwork in innovation processes. When looking at the practices of innovation teams in the same companies, we however see a low level of autonomy, a prevalence of control and diversity criteria like age and gender that seldom play a role for setting up the teams. This contradicts the calls for openness that is – according to the literature review and to voices of practitioners – condition sine qua non for interdisciplinary teams to become creative.

In case you are interested into reading the papers presented, please request a copy from bettina.minder(at)hlsu.ch.