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TopThe Complex Nature Of Innovation
In essence, innovating simply means doing something new that didn’t exist before, or doing something in a new way, a way that hasn’t been done before. Innovation is both in the process and in the resulting product.
In practice, innovation and its complexity are mostly taken for granted. The general perception of innovation is one of misunderstanding its true nature (Rossi et al., 2010). Numerous scholars, professionals and experts have attempted to dissect it, define it and explain it. Yet, innovation is still not fully understood, just because of its complexity. Although we talk about innovation rather often, we still aren’t sure of what it is, how it ‘works’, how to organize and create it, how to facilitate the conditions for it, how to repeat it. So, the question remains: What is innovation? And how can we explain the complex nature of innovation? These are the key questions we want to deal with.
Complexity is a rather unusual concept; we ‘simply’ cannot see it. For that reason we easily take complexity for granted without realising how it may actually ‘work’ in practice (Mitchell, 2011). According to Leslie Kuhn (1999), we need “a complexity based lens through which organizational life may be viewed” (p. 7) to get a better view of the complexity involved. She continues “looking through a complexity lens we see organizations as comprising a number of interacting, self-organizing, dynamic and emergent entities” (p. 11). Once we realise how complexity may be ‘at work’ in practice, we may realise that complexity may actually be taken as self-potentiating (Rescher, 1998, p. 28). This is not easy to understand. To be able to understand the complexity of innovation, however, we have to understand complexity as being part of the very complexity of innovation. Only by understanding this complexity, we may start to know how innovation may be ‘at work’ in the real. Understanding this complexity, then, may be of use for facilitating and organizing innovation within companies and organisations. Understanding innovation means understanding innovation as a time-related process. Understanding innovation means understanding innovation as a complex generative process. This notion of the generative implies creativity, which can be linked to concepts like generative processes of learning, thinking and knowing. Like Peter Senge, we may take this kind of generative learning as “learning that enhances our capacity to create” (Senge, 1990, p. 284). Our focus is on the conditions of possibility that encourage innovation as a complex generative process, thriving on interaction, with potential nonlinear effects over time. We view social interaction, with its communication processes, as the locus for innovation (cf. Rossi et al., 2010, p. 154). With this different framing of organizing innovation through organizing social interaction, then, we may become able to open up new spaces of possibility, thereby showing the potential amplification and development of new knowledge in the partners of that interaction (Nonaka, 2005, p. 166) Henceforth, the complexity perspective on innovation implies possibilities, that go way beyond “the traditional ‘linear’ model of innovation” (Rossi et al., 2011, p. 153).