2 March 2015

Call for papers: "Employee-driven Innovation"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management.

The aim of this special issue is to present and disseminate new knowledge in the field of employee-driven innovation. Innovation has a number of different sources, variations and foci, among these research-driven and user-driven innovation. Surprisingly, a relatively underdeveloped source and form of innovation is employee-driven innovation, i.e. innovation involving active participation by employees in and for the organisations in they are employed.

Employees are playing and can potentially play a much more active role in innovation, which can lead to the introduction of new products, services and work methods, and ongoing improvement in existing products, processes and issues of work organisation.

Although different theoretical approaches to work organisation based on a number of management theories touch upon employee-driven innovation as a factor for business development, there is still no major theory of employee-driven innovation. Employee-driven innovation (EDI) is a new research field attracting attention from a range of different disciplines and theoretical approaches.
Literature identifies employee-driven innovation as belonging to the broader categories of non-R&D innovation and high-involvement innovation. It focuses on innovative practices contributed by any employee at all levels of the organisation. Extant research takes as a point of departure the recognition that it is possible to gain access to such learning and innovation processes and to describe, understand and investigate them from the perspective of employees. This can be done by focusing on all types of employee in the learning environment the workplace constitutes, its work organisation, and its cultural and structural organisation of work tasks, etc.

This issue’s objective is both to supplement and advance theoretical and empirical-based knowledge in the field, but also to present new knowledge that is applicable for practitioners. The aim is to create a fruitful basis for further entrepreneurship and innovation management in firms and social institutions.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
  • How to conceptualise employee-driven innovation as a new mode of innovation
  • Exploring the employee-driven innovation concept
  • across nations and cultures
  • from the perspective of management
  • in a learning perspective
  • and worker creativity
  • as emergent and informal processes at work
  • in lean-organised organisations
  • in networks at the global level
  • How do enterprises develop capacity for employee-driven innovation?

Important Dates
Submission of manuscripts: 30 September, 2015

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