Moving Organizations towards Employee-Driven Innovation (EDI) in Work Practices and on a Global Scale: Possibilities and Challenges

Today, multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly innovate by tying into global networks of customers, suppliers, public R&D institutions and other external partners (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989; Hedlund, 1986; Sabel et al., 2009), experimenting with new ways of combining and leveraging distinctive knowledge and practices from around the world. Innovating in global networks, MNCs can no longer depend on cues from a centralized R&D lab or top management. Nor can they rely on former ‘transfer’ or ‘projection’ strategies to introduce innovations and advantages abroad through one-directional transfer of resources, information and knowledge from home to overseas environments (Chesbrough, 2003; Doz et al., 2003). To improve their innovative performance, instead, they are required to combine knowledge and learn from multiple sources (embedded in diverse organizational and institutional contexts) as well as to decentralize responsibilities and innovative search practices to various levels and sites that can respond quickly to new situations. This becomes so much more important as the firm constantly has to define for itself a new role in relation to other firms, with constant changes in the composition of global value chains, role changes that make it necessary to reform the organization, focus on new processes and bring new products to the market (Herrigel, 2010). Consequently, not only R&D units but organizational members at all levels (i.e. employees, managers, suppliers, customers and other partners) of MNCs and their surrounding institutions need to engage in mutual knowledge-sharing and an ongoing distributed search for innovations in and across various ‘collaborative communities’ (Dorf and Sabel, 1998; Hecksher and Adler, 2006; Sabel, 2007; Stark and Girard, 2002; Wenger, 1998).