Toward Employee-Driven Digital Innovation in Public Organizations Through the Use of Action Design Research

Abstract

Innovation is important for development in the private sector, but inevitably public sector also needs innovation to enhance services and processes, with research on employee-driven digital innovation in public organizations being limited. We propose a study in a public organization based on action design research (ADR) methodology to enhance theoretical knowledge and develop practice in relation to employee-driven digital innovation. This research-in-progress study follows the divided stages of ADR, where the stage of problem formulation is to be conducted through semi-structured interviews. Findings from stage 1 will provide knowledge about the phenomenon with a public organization as a context and make up the problem definition within ADR. The stage of building, interventions and evaluation is to be conducted with interventions in focus groups where we will investigate how to increase adoption of employee-driven digital innovation and how introducing digital tools can support employee-driven digital innovation as an innovation practice. The study aims to contribute by creating general solution concepts about employee-driven digital innovation.

Unmasking Inequality in the Metaverse: A Study of Skin-Tone Bias in the CryptoPunks Market

“…Their experience of "innovation champions" relates to employees driven by intrinsic motivation (Reibenspiess et al, 2019). Other studies of employee-driven digital innovation in public organizations supports this finding, identifying individuals who constantly had a development focus, either for the organization or services they provided to their users, when performing their daily work tasks (Opland et al, 2021). Creativity thus seems to be linking employee-driven digital innovation and intrinsic motivation.…”

“…However, if we return to the study by Smith et al (2012), we see that managerial support has been highlighted as a variable that influences employeedriven innovation. Previous studies of public organizations, like Opland et al (2021), have shown that this is not only related to local management support, but also to support from senior management.…”

Unfolding Effect Areas of Employee-Driven Innovation: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Moreover, some articles assert that EDI significantly influences radical innovation in organizations [3,8]. EDI has also been employed and positively impacted innovativeness in the public sector [62]. However, some literature also underscores the adverse effects of EDI on organizational innovativeness.…”

“…Employees require some form of guidance and a robust as well as trusted communication channel, for example, through a digital platform, a person, or other opportunities, when undertaking innovative tasks or promoting their ideas to a higher hierarchical level to gain recognition [60]. Therefore, managerial commitment is necessary to further increase participation in EDI [8,30,42,50,62], resulting in greater employee motivation [50,59] and aiding the creation of a communication bridge between managers and employees [6]. For this communication to function properly, knowledge and information need to be distributed bidirectionally [38], which may result in structural changes.…”

“…As the EDI concept aims to involve every employee in the innovation process to contribute innovative ideas, these ideas need to be perceived so employees recognize that they are heard and taken seriously [29]. Some articles state contrary effects, where managers were not open to receiving ideas from "outsiders" to the innovation process and considering them as irrelevant [54], or the ideas submitted were overly complex [34,53,62], resulting in lower idea acceptance rates.…”