Employee-driven digital innovation: Insights from interventions in public organizations

Abstract

Digital innovation is an important, powerful tool for organizations pursuing digital transformation. Differing from traditional innovation in its characteristics, digital innovation can be both faster and cheaper as well as make it easier for employees to get involved and contribute. In many contexts, employees can even be decisive in whether digital innovation succeeds. In that light, if organizations want to be able to utilize digital innovation their employees can be an important resource for innovation and provide valuable contributions. In recent decades, the literature on innovation has shifted focus to more democratic innovation approaches, as exemplified by open innovation, user-driven innovation, and employee-driven innovation. The shift in focus stems from the acknowledgment that organizations can and should exploit more of the potential for innovation that they possess beyond what their research and development units and experts can achieve. Those approaches may include stakeholders in the organization’s environment as well as employees. This thesis assumes that employees can constitute a decisive resource for digital innovation in organizations. Employees’ knowledge about the delivery of products and services and about the resources and structure of their organizations can provide a basis for important contributions to further developing value creation and value delivery at organizations, especially when organizations face increasing challenges with digitalization and digital transformation. But this involvement does not happen automatically in organizations, and if organizations seek to utilize this potential to a greater extent, it must be clearly valued by the management and facilitated. In this thesis, I investigate how the phenomenon of employee-driven digital innovation can contribute to increase innovation in organizations and, in turn, provide opportunities for digital transformation. My investigation is based on data collected in five empirical studies that were conducted in three case organizations and that form the basis for an action research approach. In those studies, I identified drivers of and barriers to employee-driven digital innovation based on the literature from adjacent concepts related to innovation. In turn, those insights were used to identify hackathons as a method of facilitating employee-driven digital innovation. The studies were performed in the context of public organizations, because the literature only partly sheds light on that context in research on employee-driven digital innovation. This thesis aims to contribute to lifting the black box that surrounds employee-driven digital innovation in public organizations and to inspire employees and practitioners in public organizations to explore opportunities at their disposal and participate in more innovation-oriented activities. On that count, the major contribution of the thesis is twofold. First, it expands knowledge on employee-driven digital innovation by identifying drivers and barriers that organizations need to consider when seeking to increase their innovation-oriented activity. Second, it offers new insights into using hackathons as a method of facilitating employee-driven digital innovation. Both the theoretical and practical contributions of the thesis can serve as starting points for academics and practitioners who want to delve deeper into the phenomenon of employee-driven digital innovation.