EUWIN and Workplace innovation: a new horizon for work? 

Organizations need to change: employee driven innovation is more and more recognized as a factor to help change in the right direction. In an increasingly volatile environment, investments in technology and skills alone are insufficient to ensure the innovation and versatility required for a sustainable future. Effective and sustainable organizations are likely to be those in which workers at all levels use and develop their full range of knowledge, experience and creativity, responding to external challenges and opportunities while simultaneously building their own resilience and quality of working life. The emerging concept of workplace innovation describes the work practices that enable such outcomes. Workplace innovation should help better quality of working life. 

EUWIN, the European learning network on workplace innovation, brings together practitioners and scholars to exchange information and experiences how to change organizations to become more innovative. The development of a such a network helps to identify more cases on workplace innovation in the whole of Europe. All over the world, other approaches (ex. Relational coordination by Jody Gittel Hoffer, 2011) try to achieve a comparable result. What are the results after one year of EUWIN? What has the evidence on workplace innovation brought? Do we see impact on job and organizational level?

The Stream will bring together scholars with fresh and diverse insights into both the nature and impact of workplace innovation. Papers may be of a descriptive or prescriptive nature. We invite papers that show results or workplace innovation at national, company and worker level. 

Contact: Geert Van Hootegem Geert.VanHootegem@soc.kuleuven.be