PurposeIn a world where innovation became a “buzzword” and everyone within companies is required to foster innovation, the engagement of people toward innovation is fundamental to prompt individual motivation and actions to make innovation happen. However, despite the relevance of the relationship between engagement and innovation, the literature on the topic appears still fragmented. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the topic through a systematic literature review.Design/methodology/approachA final sample of 108 papers has been selected and analyzed through co-citation and text mining analyses. The former enabled the analysis of the structure of the theoretical foundation of the filed, while the latter facilitated a systematic and unbiased content-driven review of the literature.FindingsThe results of the analysis indicated two main areas of interest describing the relationship between engagement and innovation. On the one hand, there is the focus on “engagement as an attitude,” intended as the capacity of individuals to generate and realize innovation. On the other hand, there is a stream of literature focused on “engagement as involvement,” which refers to co-innovation paradigms, involving both internal and external stakeholders.Research limitations/implicationsFrom an academic perspective, this paper highlights the relevance of the “human-side” of innovation, proposing avenues for future research that dig into the relationship between people's engagement and innovation dynamics. Moreover, it shows how the recent developments in the innovation management literature are coherent with this emerging relevance of the human perspective in innovation.Practical implicationsFrom a practitioner’s perspective, this paper helps managers by highlighting the two different approaches that they can have in terms of engagement. The study aims to help them in identifying the kind of engagement they are looking for in their employees and other innovation stakeholder having the support to find relevant studies in that direction.Originality/valueThe study unveils how the evolution of both areas over the years is strictly related to the megatrends of innovation fields, which are the main areas of knowledge not covered yet. Therefore, a research agenda is proposed.

Innovation is a collective and collaborative act. Even though ideas germinate in individuals' minds, they need social interaction to be improved and brought to realisation. Therefore, much attention is now being paid to team collaboration as an organisational essential for innovation. Collaboration facilitates the combining of perspectives, competencies, and resources. However, it has been shown that limits arise when it comes to converging views into a shared perspective and its interpretation. Innovation is not all about pooling competencies and resources but also about immersion and reflection. It is a process of collaborative sensemaking that benefits from intimate and close collaboration. In this paper, we investigate how collaboration between twos, before an idea is shared with a large team, could facilitate the later collaborative sensemaking process through which the larger team must pass in bringing the innovation to reality. Through a laboratory experiment, we prove how collaborating in a close relationship in a pair has a positive impact on collaborative sensemaking in a subsequent collaborative effort in a larger team setting. In particular, we demonstrate how the pair acts as a pivot in the larger team and accelerates the rate of growing perception and understanding of the innovative idea.

PurposeThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a global digitalization of organizational activities: the pandemic forced people and organizations to profoundly review values, purposes and norms. However, the research on how digital technologies impact human relationships and interactions at work results fragmented. Still, the importance of understanding which behaviors and norms enhance social interactions and organizational performances in digital environments remains critical, especially after COVID-19 advent. Therefore, this study explores how human relationships change in a wholly digital environment and what to expect for the new normal.Design/methodology/approachThe study first explores the research gap through a systematic literature review to clearly understand what emerged so far. Second, through semi-structured interviews and a focus group, an empirical analysis was conducted.FindingsFindings suggest that both work and emotional dimensions are crucial to nurturing human relationships in a digital environment. More precisely, the study unveils the need for innovative leaders to review their approaches to communication and the work experience and consider the emotional dimension in terms of community purpose and individual well-being, while identifying rituals as an overlapping tool. Finally, the authors propose a parallelism between these results and the agile revolution to inspire leaders to rethink their leadership and behaviors getting closer to the agile approach, which may represent a valuable way to rethink human relations in our professional environment.Originality/valueThe paper sheds light on an ongoing phenomenon that touches the lives of each organizational actor. The two-step structure hopes to provide both a structured base of the knowledge developed to date, proposing a systematic view of what has been studied since the outbreak of the pandemic to date and to provide insights for future developments.

Innovation is a collaborative act. Thus, a lot of attention has been paid to teamwork as the prevalent approach for innovation in companies. However, teams also present limits, due to conflicts and compromises when converging. This study, which focuses on the development of innovative directions, explores the nature of collaboration by looking at the purest unit of collaboration: the pair. We isolate the case of pair collaboration and investigate, through empirical investigations, the sensemaking process people accomplish and how it is affected by those tensions that affect teams when innovating. We observe how innovation unfolds when people move from creating individually, in pair and finally in team. Findings suggest that the pair creates an intimate environment where innovative thinking, alignment and engagement flourish and that it is a good intermediate step towards teamwork. This paper acknowledges an underestimated dynamic of innovation, pair collaboration, which has real potential to address one of organisations’ most problematic challenges: people engagement and convergence towards an innovative direction.

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