Strategic and Everyday Innovative Narratives: Translating Ideas into Everyday Life in Organizations

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to advance the concept of collaborative innovation by an interpretative approach to study the micro-level implementation process of innovation. The article explains the role of the translation of ideas, demonstrating how narratives play an important role for employees in making sense of innovative ideas in everyday practice. An empirical case is offered to demonstrate how two types of innovation narratives emerge: strategic and everyday narratives through involvement of spokespersons and employees. These findings suggest that an advanced understanding of the roles of different narratives is required in future studies of innovative organizations.Keywords: Innovation, collaboration, organizing, strategic narratives, everyday antenarratives, spokespersons.IntroductionRecent years have witnessed a proliferation of innovation studies focusing on how innovation theory consists of the production of ideas and the importance of generating new ideas (Johannessen et al., 2001; Flynn et al., 2003; Teofilovic, 2002). These studies attempt to map out various possibilities of idea generation, prototyping and the testing of these ideas in the public and private sectors. The argument in this article is that innovation literature needs to focus more closely on the implementation process of these new ideas. This perspective is especially relevant for innovation in the public sector, where service innovation is as important as product innovation (Osborne and Brown, 2005). Some researchers argue (Van de Ven et al., 1999; Robertson and Seneviratne, 1995) that public innovation does not differ much from private innovation, but change initiatives in public service organizations appear to be more conducive to improving performance when change programs are initiated (Robertson and Seneviratne, 1995:547). In this article we will present a case involving a public service innovation program that illustrates how service innovation is emerging through the translation of an idea into everyday organizational practice by narrative collaboration.Much innovation research points out the various issues that might block change in the implementation process. Beer and Eisenstat (2000) list what they call 'the silent killers of organizational change' as e.g. ineffective senior management teams, poor vertical communication and unclear strategies. These scholars have focused on the balance between fostering an adaptive organization in which the organizational members accept and work with continual change. Morgan (1997) argues that focusing solely on the technical aspects ignores the social and informal aspects of organizational life and the opportunity to understand work resistance to change. Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) believe the failure to change occurs when a mismatch exists between the preferred change strategy and the ability of organizational members to absorb and understand the effort. This mismatch and the resulting response among organizational members is the focus of this article, whose goal is to enhance our understanding of the implementation process by highlighting the interpretative aspect of the implementation process.Interpretative approaches (Fischer and Forester, 1993; Yanow, 1996; Czarniawska-Joerges, 2004) examine the significant role of translating meaning as an important factor in the implementation process of innovation. A crucial factor for changing the everyday life in an organization is the organizational members' ability to make sense of the change process. One way to create sense is by generating narratives and having narrators, as this allows organizational members to tell stories about the change events in order to understand them. Consequently, the narrator also becomes an important actor.Narrative theory is important because it looks at how meaning is structured through storytelling and how these stories guide how ideas are translated into local settings. …