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Stefan Lindegaard had an interesting post on LinkedIn the other day, saying that ‘The language of innovation and how people understand the term is vague and fuzzy at best; dangerous at worst. This can cripple organizations and their efforts for building better organizational capabilities for innovation.’

Lindegaard pointed out some very important questions regarding innovation: What makes some companies more innovative than the others? How are creativity and innovation interrelated? Are companies too focused on innovation as an outcome, not as a process?

These questions hit well with my own recent research. As I have concluded so far, it seems that a lot of companies lack behind on strategies that embrace the importance of understanding the socially constructed narratives directing their increasingly complex value networks. Given that modern organisations are still far too excessive in their need to fragment, compete on and react to the cultural grounds surrounding them, managing creativity and innovation however call for more advanced understanding of the emerging individual and institutional variables and their interdependences.

In order to foster their network-specific innovation capabilities, companies should better engage with their customers, shareholders and other possible interest groups. That is, open communication plays a crucial role in elevating stimulating innovation, and developing a common understanding of the visions and aims will help companies in fostering both individual and organizational creativity and innovation. Yet, surprisingly, little is known about the explicit and symbolic (inter) relationships between the different actors involved in the value creation processes—or about how they impact on the network-specific innovation capabilities.

In ‘Creating a shared narrative: the use of causal layered analysis to explore value cocreation in a novel service ecosystem’, now published at the European Journal of Futures Research, new insight and practical advice will be provided for both managers and participants for increasing their awareness and interest on how to use their networks in more strategic ways.

You might also be interested in my earlier publications, e.g. on ‘Re-inventing creativity and innovation through adapting a service-based working culture‘ or from by presentation on ‘From interactions to cocreation. A systems view on digitalisation and the thereby changing management practices‘.