Diffusion of Organisational Innovations: Learning from selected programmes

Report, 2013

How to design national programmes that can increase innovativeness among existing companies is a challenge for public innovation agencies. Therefore Vinnova, the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems, commissioned this study to get an overview of interesting initiatives globally to learn from. Among issues covered are how to initiate sustained change processes in companies and how to scale programmes from pilot projects to broad national impact. Initially 200 programmes globally were surveyed and through a step-wise process finally seven programmes were identified for in-depth analysis. These seven were selected based on that they could provide different and complementary insights into how to design dissemination processes in practice. The seven programmes were: IMP³rove in Europe, Innovation Engineering System in the USA, Stage-Gate® in Canada, CENTRIM and GrowthAccelerator in the UK, TYKES/Liideri in Finland, and Production Leap in Sweden. The programmes were in themselves organisational innovations that had been continuously refined and re-invented due to learning processes among stakeholders in the programmes. Most programmes had standardised their work methods and tools but provided flexibility in the detailed outlining of the solution delivered to client firms. Programmes designed to scaling up accomplished this trough training of consultants combined with accreditation for quality assurance. Almost all programmes also used some kind of learning networks with peer-to-peer mechanisms for learning, but the outcome varied, partly due to the availability of experienced facilitators. Most programmes followed a standard design of dissemination steps by first creating an awareness activity which also served to identify potential candidates. The impact of interventions in the Innovation Management field are difficult to measure and analyse and programmes are usually measured in terms of fulfilment of program goals supplemented by qualitative perception data from participants.