White Spaces Innovation in Sweden - Innovation policy for ... - Vinnova

WHITE SPACES INNOVATION IN SWEDENand additionally costly because of pushing the pendulum back to hierarchical control.Thus in early cellular telephony, AT&T spun off Lucent but managed it hierarchically.Ericsson did the same but structured it so that traditional telephone culture dominatedthe „lawless‟ cellular radio engineers, dividing labour into specialised project units.These spawned further specialised units to re-integrate the imposed division of labour ina Byzantine creativity-destroying „hierocracy‟.The group of theorists most closely addressing these analytical-interpretive organisationalissues as well as the main focus of interest in this contribution, which is the studyof regional innovation from a complexity geography perspective, are what might collectivelybe called the „design theorists‟. These are represented in Fig. 4.3; each of them ishighly focused on the rational, individual, creative action process involved in innovation.Importantly, each is interested in design as a communicative process involvinginteraction with external actors not just those inside a particular organisation. Moreover,each departs somewhat from purely analytical or deductive individual reasoning infavour of a more interpretive analysis of collective innovation processes. These areinteresting to the extent they inform and take further in explanatory terms results like„preadaptation‟ or even more interestingly exploitation of the „adjacent possible‟ asidentified in complexity science by the likes of Kauffman (2008).Learning from the FutureWe start from the left side of Fig. 4.3 with Scharmer and his Theory „U‟ perspective.There is an unknown space where, say, an innovation lies – specified in Fig. 3 as the„mystery‟. For Scharmer, getting there is a matter of accessing pre-tacit knowledge, forhim in the form of metaphors or analogies at the hermeneutic level. Stacey (2001) alsoseeks to transcend tacit knowledge as irremediably compromised because of the contradictionthat it involves „expressing the inexpressible‟. Contrariwise, he points out thatPolanyi made no binary distinction between tacit and codified knowledge of the kindoverdone by the likes of Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995). Accordingly, for Stacey knowledgeis continuous, communicative and collective in organisations and elsewhere. Thiswould include clusters, where the hypothesis that tacit learning determines the proximityimperative clearly requires a total re-think. Innovation involves imagining and indeed„learning from the future‟ not simply learning from the past. Such acts of imagination,individually and collectively, involve a process of „presencing‟, meaning being aware ofthe present but sensing the future. This involves giving serious attention to collectivereflections, observing, to check them, opening the mind for sensing and „presencing‟ anemergent future, crystalising the new idea, prototyping it and, finally, performing orimplementing it. This can seem like management mumbo-jumbo, it has to be said.Moreover, as presented, the movement through the seven precepts down the left side ofScharmer‟s „U‟ and up the right side looks to be a remarkably linear, rationalist process.Nevertheless, as we shall see, Scharmer goes a little deeper into more iteratively presentedprocesses aimed at solving the „mystery‟ than the other two authors, contributing86