Leadership for Innovation

Ken Dovey

Sharegune PresentationOrkestra3 October 2013

THINK.CHANGE.DO

(i) Leadership is a contingent; contextual; and political phenomenon. It involves, inter alia, working with power, culture, mental models, various interests.

(ii) Leadership needs to facilitate on-going answers to the questions:

• what really matters (mission)?• who really matters (key stakeholders)?• which resources really matter?• how should power be managed (governance)?

1 Leadership for Innovation in the 21st Century

2. The Relationship-Based Intangible Capital Resources (ICRs) that Underpin Innovation in a Knowledge Economy

(i) Social capital: resources such as trust; norms of reciprocity and voluntary support; capacity to ‘fight for excellence’ effectively.

(ii) Morale capital: resources such as commitment, enthusiasm, dedication, resilience (note: morale capital is also mission-based)

(iii) Conceptual capital: resources such as ideas, knowledge, absorptive capacity.

Leadership needs to create a social environment (relationships) in which these (free) resources are generated and leveraged in the interests of effective innovation.

(i) Social reality is different to the natural reality: it is an ‘inter-subjective’ reality that has been socially constructed around the interests, needs, values, and aspirations of those who have the most power within it. Thus, there can be no ‘general laws’ governing social reality – its nature is established and sustained/transformed by ‘political’ action.

3. Innovation Research Methodologies: Challenging the Traditional (Positivist) Ontological and Epistemological Assumptions

(ii) Research seeking to answer questions about the social dimensions of innovation therefore has to be located in research paradigms other than that of positivism (the scientific method): Research seeking purely to understand social realities should be located within the interpretive research paradigm (ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory), while research seeking to understand and transformsocial realities should be located within the constructionist research paradigm (action research).

3. Innovation Research Methodologies: Challenging the Traditional (Positivist) Ontological and Epistemological Assumptions (cont.)

(iii) The nature of social knowledge. Social knowledge does not exist in objective form. It is idiographic – contingent, unique, and subjective (and inter-subjective) in nature. It is tied to contexts, events and human experience. It can never be explicated exactly and will always be interpreted uniquely. It is an emergent phenomenon - ever changing as social realities transform through new experience - with its meaning contingent upon human sense-making of current and past experience.

3. Innovation Research Methodologies: Challenging the Traditional (Positivist) Ontological and Epistemological Assumptions (cont.)

Leadership needs to ‘work with’ academic research culture (deeply socialized shared research assumptions) and embedded personal mental models (life-time work/identity being challenged by alternative assumptions) so as to facilitate work within appropriate research paradigms for the various aspects of innovation research.

3. Innovation Research Methodologies: Challenging the Traditional (Positivist) Ontological and Epistemological Assumptions (cont.)