Organisational Development
“To enact a social innovation, an organization must have a capacity for synthesis – the ability to see and develop non-obvious connections between seemingly separate ideas and cultures.” (W. Nilsson & Paddock, 2013, p. 4)
Whilst the traditional framing of social innovation produces a dialect which can apply to any situation, be it individuals, organisations, governments or even unrelated instances of social innovation, most relevant to this research is the understanding of the role of the organisation within the process of social innovation. This focus on organisational development stems from the basis that within any group structure the organisation is the continuous source, the ground from which the tree of social innovation grows and therefore tending to its roots is key. Put another way, the organisation is the ecosystem which either enables or detracts from the ability for a group of humans to socially innovate together (Cajaiba-santana, 2014), and it is this relational aspect that the concluding statements (relating to the works of Kaplan (2002)) of the above section were alluding to. As Kaplan (2002) so succinctly puts it, “the new emerges, it is not created. We can only hope to create suitable conditions from which it may emerge” (p. xix), making the organisation the primary environment where such conditions could arise. The importance of developing this environment for repetitive innovation is described below.
“In most organisations the highest payoff is not in innovating the solution but in innovating how people work together to implement the new possibilities they see amid organisational inertia, bureaucracy and risk aversion”
(Liedtka, King, & Bennett, …show more content…
The roots of this practice are
“To enact a social innovation, an organization must have a capacity for synthesis – the ability to see and develop non-obvious connections between seemingly separate ideas and cultures.” (W. Nilsson & Paddock, 2013, p. 4)
Whilst the traditional framing of social innovation produces a dialect which can apply to any situation, be it individuals, organisations, governments or even unrelated instances of social innovation, most relevant to this research is the understanding of the role of the organisation within the process of social innovation. This focus on organisational development stems from the basis that within any group structure the organisation is the continuous source, the ground from which the tree of social innovation grows and therefore tending to its roots is key. Put another way, the organisation is the ecosystem which either enables or detracts from the ability for a group of humans to socially innovate together (Cajaiba-santana, 2014), and it is this relational aspect that the concluding statements (relating to the works of Kaplan (2002)) of the above section were alluding to. As Kaplan (2002) so succinctly puts it, “the new emerges, it is not created. We can only hope to create suitable conditions from which it may emerge” (p. xix), making the organisation the primary environment where such conditions could arise. The importance of developing this environment for repetitive innovation is described below.
“In most organisations the highest payoff is not in innovating the solution but in innovating how people work together to implement the new possibilities they see amid organisational inertia, bureaucracy and risk aversion”
(Liedtka, King, & Bennett, …show more content…
The roots of this practice are