Creating Work: Employee-Driven Innovation through Work Practice Reconstruction

Considerations of Employee-Driven Innovation generally posit innovation as an advance in the substantive products, services and/or processes of an organization. More broadly, innovation can also refer to anything that seeks to do something new, or address a concern that would not otherwise be met. Employees contribute to innovation in many ways: they can generate and/ or implement a product or service; they can generate and/or implement new technologies; however, they can also influence the ways in which an organization adapts and evolves over time in more subtle ways through instigating work practice changes. Although these more subtle changes may not appear under the banner of organizational innovation, they nevertheless contribute to the creation and application of new organizational processes, practices and outputs. They may also never be part of the conscious and explicit agenda of the organization or be something that managers have a strong role in initiating. However, their effects can be cumulative and substantial.