Innovation and systems change: the example of mobile, collaborative workplaces

Forces such as increasing globalisation, demographic change, European enlargement, and the emergence of networked organisations stimulate the emergence of new forms of organisation and collaborative working. Mobility, sharing of information and knowledge, and collaboration across organisational networks are key aspects of workplace innovations. New information and communication technologies enable a diversity of future workplace scenarios. However, coping with the human and organisational aspects involved will determine their success or failure. In order to exploit the potential of workplace innovations we, therefore, must better understand their systemic nature. This article, based on the MOSAIC project, explores the potential of mobile and multi-location collaborative workplaces, investigates some future scenarios and roadmaps, and discusses the strategies and research approaches for systemic innovation.

The Paradox of Diversity Management,Creativity and Innovation

This conceptual and discursive paper argues that diversity is a recognizable source of creativity and innovation that can provide a basis for competitive advantage. On the other hand, diversity is also a cause of misunderstanding, suspicion and conflict in the workplace that can result in absenteeism, poor quality, low morale and loss of competitiveness. Firms seeking competitive advantage therefore face a paradoxical situation. If they embrace diversity, they risk workplace conflict, and if they avoid diversity, they risk loss of competitiveness. The advantages and disadvantages associated with workforce diversity put organizations in a position of managing a paradoxical situation. To give support to this assertion, the paper considers what is meant by diversity, how it is best managed, what its relationship with creativity and innovation might be and how the problems created by the management of diversity, creativity and innovation might be resolved.     

Age and technology innovation in the workplace: Does work context matter?

Two workplace trends will become increasingly important in years to come: reliance on information technology (IT) and workforce aging. This study explores the influence of workplace context on employee reactions to the implementation of a new IT initiative to better understand innovation enhancers and inhibitors. Employees from multiple workplace departments completed a questionnaire that assessed their reactions to the implementation. Age-based differences and contextual influences were estimated to predict satisfaction with the implementation process. Hierarchical linear models indicate that younger workers reported less satisfaction than older workers—an effect that was more pronounced in relatively young departments. These findings challenge ageist notions and emphasize the role of context on attitudes formation. Multi-institutional and multilevel field-setting data are rare making this a unique research contribution.     

Toward a deeper understanding of IT adoption: A multilevel analysis

This study adopts a multilevel perspective and uses cross-level modeling to explore how resistance to change (RTC) influences information technology (IT) adoption behaviors. RTC is conceptualized at two levels of analysis (personal and contextual) and with two levels of specificity (distal and proximal). Data were collected from 258 employees within 25 administrative work units undergoing a new IT initiative. The findings from this study reveal a “maverick effect” wherein pro-initiative employees react in contrast to their workplace contexts. They champion IT adoption when their work units resist the IT initiative and prolong IT adoption when their work units readily embrace the IT initiative. This study introduces a novel interactionist perspective on IT adoption that considers employee dispositions and perceptions, as well as workplace climate and culture, as enablers and inhibitors of IT adoption. Moreover, the study advocates for change management practices that account for multilevel interactions among the personal and contextual influences of IT adoption.     

Construction of Meaning in Socio‐Technical Networks: Artefacts as Mediators between Routine and Crisis Conditions

This article focuses on the construction of meanings taking place in organizational routinized innovation processes. The results of the single case study investigating the company Carmlod, which institutionalized a routine process for their innovations, show how boundary objects like standardized methods and designed objects facilitate the communication process within interdisciplinary teams. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that team members continue using the distinct meanings of the mutually shared object. They follow their strategies and goals according to their professional disciplinary knowledge. Only when a fundamental crisis takes place, in which nobody knows the right strategy to achieve a possible solution any more, do artefacts within the contingent space of manoeuvre become important. In the process, team members are forced to enter into a coercion‐free discourse within a socio‐technical network that allows them to come up with true innovation and genuine collectively shared meanings.     

Higher Education Reform for Computer Major Students in Open and Research Environments

This paper analyzes the requirement of professional computer talents in Chinese universities,and introduces the practice in innovative educational methods taken by Shandong University in an open and research environment.In order to improve educational quality,we have carried out a serial of reforms,including "Four Experiences" aiming at diversifying study environments and fostering their adaptability and extending their vision.Students are encouraged to join "Research Assistant" program and participate in scientific projects to improve their ability in research and innovation.They also conduct "Engineering Practice" to learn latest modeling and programming skills.Compound talents characterized of solid foundation,high quality and strong practical ability are shaped through these initiatives.     

Spreading good ideas: a case study of the adoption of an innovation in the construction sector

A health and safety association collaborated with two research centres to examine the dissemination of knowledge of an ergonomic intervention by opinion leaders in the construction sector. The intervention was a hydraulic ladder lift that aided with loading and unloading of ladders off van roofs. Thirteen companies, with five to 900 employees, were involved. The van operators informed workmates not employed by their companies but who worked on the same site as them about the intervention. The opinion leaders informed decision makers within their companies which led to commitments to purchase similar units. They also gave presentations at prearranged health and safety meetings, where attendees indicated that they thought the intervention sounded like a good idea. In this way, knowledge of the innovation reached at least 32 more companies and potentially several thousand other employees. The study showed the potential for workplace change to be exponential.     

Excellent software professionals: experience,work activities,and perception by peers

Abstract

This paper reports findings of a field study examining expertise in 29 software development projects. Using a peer nomination method, 33 out of 200 subjects were characterized as excellent software professionals. Excellent software professionals are described as having high technical and computational knowledge, a high level of social skills, and as using a method-oriented working style. They have a broader, not longer professional experience than do their colleagues. Excellent and average software professionals do not differ with respect to time spent on typical software development activities such as design, coding, or testing, but excellent software professionals are more often engaged in review meetings and consultations than are other team members.     

Distributed Apprenticeship in Online Communities

Supporting learning in online communities is an important direction for the future of human–computer interaction as people increasingly leverage social technologies to support professional growth and development. However, few have studied how people leverage the socio-technical affordances of online informal workplace communities to develop professional skills in the absence of dedicated expert guidance. We draw from theories of apprenticeship to introduce an emergent theory of distributed apprenticeship, which outlines how community expectations of transparency and mutual support allow for instruction to be directed by a distributed network of nonexperts. We develop distributed apprenticeship through a qualitative study of crowdfunding entrepreneurs, where novices leverage social interactions with community members to develop a wide range of entrepreneurial skills. We then generalize distributed apprenticeship to other workplace contexts and provide design implications for online communities where people develop professional skills with minimal dedicated formal guidance.     

Integrating ergonomics into engineering: Empirical evidence and implications for the ergonomists

Engineering design is a strong determinant of workplace ergonomics. A survey among 680 engineers in 20 Danish enterprises indicated that engineers are not aware that they influence the work environment of other people. Ergonomics had a low rating among engineers, perhaps because neither management nor safety organizations expressed any expectations in this area. The study further indicated that effects of ergonomics training in engineering schools were very limited. The engineering cultures in enterprises, together with other organizational factors, are suggested to be of greater importance than the professional training. The implications for industrial ergonomists might be an acknowledgement of the role as change agent when trying to integrate ergonomics into engineering. In doing so, they need also to acknowledge that engineers are widely different. They have different backgrounds and a “sensitivity” to ergonomics depending on their current engineering domain, tasks, organizational position, and the industrial branch of their organization. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Hum Factors Man 17: 353–366, 2007.     

Clinical managers' identity at the crossroad of multiple institutional logics in it innovation: The case study of a health care organization in England

Clinical managers play a crucial role in securing the implementation and sustainability of information technology (IT) innovation in health care. Yet, not all clinical managers are willing and able to support IT innovation, particularly when the institutional logics of an IT innovation challenge their professional practice. We investigate how clinical managers use their hybrid identities to reconcile differences among competing institutional logics that affect IT innovation. Based on three examples of IT innovation (telehealth for obstructive sleep apnoea, telehealth for heart failure, and electrocardiograms) in a health care organization in England, we identify three roles in IT innovation (innovation advocate, innovation broker, and innovation laggard) that clinical managers enacted in response to three degrees of conflict between institutional logics (no conflict, moderate conflict, and high conflict), respectively. We make the following contributions. First, we demonstrate how clinical managers' perception of their hybrid role in relation to their professional identity influences their response to the conflicting institutional demands of IT innovation. We conclude that clinical managers' fragmented identities can compromise their ability to effectively manage IT innovation in health care. Second, our findings raise implications for understanding the role of professionals' hybrid identities in the implementation of digital transformation at the intersection of multiple institutional logics.     

Social media at work: The roles of job satisfaction,employment status,and Facebook use with co-workers

Limited research has studied workplace satisfaction in a computer-mediated context, particularly with the use of social media. Based on an analysis of an online survey of working adults (N = 512) in various companies and organizations in a metropolitan area in Southern California, we tested the relationships among time spent on Facebook interacting with co-workers, employment status, and job satisfaction. Results show that an employee's satisfaction at work is positively associated with the amount of time they spend on Facebook interacting with co-workers. Contrary to our initial predictions, results to the second and third hypotheses revealed that part time employees reported having spent the highest amount of time on Facebook with their co-workers, and contract employees reported the highest degree of job satisfaction at work. Results have implications for Facebook as a strategic platform for promoting employee satisfaction at work, and Facebook a social network/ing platform for part time employees seeking further social integration and professional connection.     

Communication and Context: Collective Tacit Knowledge and Practice in Japan’s Workplace ba

In contrast to Schumpeter’s “perennial gale of creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1976: 84), government–coordinated economic development in post–1945 Japan has owed more to informal (but binding) “rules of the game” (North 1990) that situate working, learning and innovation within the spaces delineated by tightly bounded company–as–family workplace organisations or ‘ba’ (which roughly means ‘place’ or ‘interaction field’). Horizontal keiretsu groupings, together with fixed trading–patterns in supply and distribution chains, continue to support an interlocking ‘steady state’ economic structure in which new technologies tend to emerge from existing organisations. Shared experience within workplace ba generates tacit knowledge that is held in common by colleagues and retained as a potent tool for shaping future practice. It plays a vital role in facilitating ‘friction free’ communication amongst insiders, who can act as a group to ostracise and retaliate against agents who break their code. Long–term obligations link salaried male employees to their workplace ba. Consequently, autonomous boundary–spanning communities of practice, together with industry–university collaboration and other transient associations with outsiders, lack legitimacy. Cook and Brown’s (1999) pluralist epistemology is used to compare Western interpretations of Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge (Gibbons et al 1994) with the privileged role that Japan’s workplace ba accord to insider collective–tacit knowledge, which we tentatively call ‘Mode 3’ knowledge.     

以创造性思维反弹琵琶——创新思维与设计意识的开发训练

本文从灵感、积累、推理、创新四个方面寻求全新的创造性思维开发训练的方式,为从事视觉设计活动从业人员和学习设计的学生不断地更新和塑造自己的设计风格提供了行之有效的方法。     

Developing a holistic understanding of workplace health: the case of bank workers

Understanding health in the workplace from a holistic perspective requires appropriate research approaches. An exploratory, qualitative study with whitecollar employees from a large banking organization in the North West of England is detailed here. The aim was to explore health from the perspective of the employee. Semi-structured interviews (n = 29) elicited detailed responses, allowing the relationship between psychosocial and lifestyle factors to be examined. Psychosocial factors such as job design, ability to make decisions and control over work were all reported to be positive contributors to health in the work setting-and often were reported to be more relevant than individual lifestyle issues. A more holistic approach to developing workplace health programmes in the future is recommended, which allows the workplace setting to be considered as a complex system. Very few comprehensive workplace health programmes exist at present within UK organizations, and there is a tendency for programmes to be designed by the health professional ‘expert’ rather than developed in conjunction with, and by the workforce. It is argued that qualitative research methods can help to begin the dialogue needed for workplace health programme development.     

Excellent software professionals: experience, work activities, and perception by peers

This paper reports findings of a field study examining expertise in 29 software development projects. Using a peer nomination method, 33 out of 200 subjects were characterized as excellent software professionals. Excellent software professionals are described as having high technical and computational knowledge, a high level of social skills, and as using a method-oriented working style. They have a broader, not longer professional experience than do their colleagues. Excellent and average software professionals do not differ with respect to time spent on typical software development activities such as design, coding, or testing, but excellent software professionals are more often engaged in review meetings and consultations than are other team members.     

The effects of organizational learning environment factors on e-learning acceptance

Workplace learning is an important means of employees’ continuous learning and professional development. E-learning is being recognized as an important supportive practice for learning at work. Current research on the success factors of e-learning in the workplace has emphasized on employees’ characteristics, technological attributes, and training design elements, with little attention to workplace contextual effects. The study aims to investigate the impacts of organizational learning environment factors, including managerial support, job support, and organizational support, on employees’ motivation to use a workplace e-learning system. A model was proposed based on the expectancy theory of training motivation and the social influences and facilitating conditions in technology acceptance models. The model was tested on sample data collected from mainland China using Structural Equation Modeling and Moderated Structural Equation Modeling. The results suggested that employees’ perceived managerial support and job support had a significant impact on their perceived usefulness of the e-learning system for individual learning, and that perceived organizational support had a significant influence on the perceived usefulness of the e-learning system for social learning. Perceived usefulness for individual learning was found to completely mediate the environmental influences on individuals’ motivation to use the system, while perceived usefulness for social learning made partial mediation in the effects of the environmental factors on intention to use. In addition, perceived job support was found to have moderating effects on the relationship between employees’ perceived usefulness of the e-learning system and their intention to use the system. Consistent with previous findings, employees’ perceptions about the usefulness of the e-learning system have significant effects on their intention to use the system in the work setting.     

Ideas in the Workplace: A New Approach Towards Organizing the Fuzzy Front End of the Innovation Process

This article pinpoints requirements for organizing the fuzzy front end of the innovation process. The author derived the conditions for computer‐aided idea management from benchmarking the fuzzy front ends of several German and European companies and proposes differentiating between general and company‐specific requirements for organizing the fuzzy front end. It is suggested that structuring the fuzzy front end involves low financial investment but highly sensitive and transparent leadership. Using specific properties of ideas in the workplace as springboards, considerations on further new requirements for successful idea management are developed. Placing a particular emphasis on the interface between the idea owner and the idea‐adoption system, an ‘idea types’ model is developed, which defines four different extreme types of employees and their inclinations to solve problems. An extended set of requirements for managing ideas in the workplace as a useful instrument in creation and implementation of idea‐pipelines in companies and in checking software programmes for idea management or the early stages of new product development programmes is presented.     

谈中专计算机教学中培养学生创新能力的有效途径

信息社会高速发展需要有创新能力的人才,中专计算机课程的培养是一个系统教育,具备知识性和技能性相结合的专业特点,因此它在中专学校开展创新教育方面有着很大的潜力。创新能力的培养尤其体现在实践当中,不仅要培养学生的创造力,教师还要不断提高自身专业知识业务素质,在教育思想和教学模式上取得创新,才能更加有效的实行创新教育。     

协同创新的应用型本科双创教育平台构建

在国家大力实施创新驱动发展战略的背景下,各大高校都推出了各项创新创业教育改革措施。在实施的过程中出现了与专业教育结合不紧密、创业创新项目落地、师资队伍薄弱等问题。针对以上问题,本文以应用型通信人才创新创业教育为例,构建"4大平台-3个层次-模块化"的校企协作创新实践教学平台,实现创新创业教育与专业实践教育相结合,促进应用型本科技术人才的创新创业教育改革发展。