In an organization, understood as a stable system of individuals who work together to achieve common goals through a hierarchy of ranks and a division of labor, innovations are usually bound to collective and authority innovation decisions. In such cases an individual cannot adopt a new idea unless the organization has previously adopted it. Compared to the innovation decision process by individuals, the innovation process in organizations is much more complex. This is particularly the case in the implementation phase, which typically involves a number of individuals–both opponents and champions of the new idea. Further, implementation amounts to mutual adaptation in which both the innovation and the organization change in important ways.
Published in Chapter:
Electronic Gaming in Germany as Innovation in Education
Andreas Breiter (Institute for Information Management, University of Bremen, Germany) and Castulus Kolo (Macromedia University of Applied Sciences, Munich, Germany)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-808-6.ch010
Abstract
Electronic gaming in education remains a theoretical or at best marginal issue as long as it is not adopted in general educational settings. The latter, however, not only depends on the intrinsic values or advantages discussed in other contributions to this volume. Rather, electronic gaming in education provides an interesting example for a complex adoption process where individual choices, organizational frameworks, and educational policies, as well as attitudes in the society at-large, interfere in the diffusion of gaming devices and the adoption of gaming for learning processes. After introducing an analytical framework for structuring such processes of the diffusion of innovations, the authors present empirical evidence from the adoption process of electronic gaming in Germany. The results are discussed focusing on the role of several influencing factors on the scope and the speed of innovations. The chapter concludes with possible generalizations departing from the specific situation and the tradition of education in Germany.