Notes By Ph.D.

Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

These are some of the notes I made during my participation in the European
Management Research conference EURAM 2008, which provides a quick insight
into some of the research taking place at the moment within the fields of innovation,
diversity and leadership in Europe right now.

I need however to emphasize that my notes have not been “cleared” by the
researchers who are the protagonists in these notes, these are not their words by
my interpretation of their words and their research. So please do not quote from
these notes or use them for anything more than they were intended for, namely
inspiration.

And please forgive any errors, misunderstandings or spelling mistakes in the notes
- they have not been revised but a published just as they are. This said, please enjoy
- and be inspired, there is SO much fascinating research out there, and in here!

Susanne Justesen
INNOVERSITY RESEARCH

Klerkegade 19,1
DK-1308 Copenhagen
Denmark
Mail: Susanne@innoversity.dk
Tel: +45 3113 1616

If you would like to know more about INNOVERSITY RESEARCH, please visit www.innoversity.dk

ABOUT EURAM: A LITTLE PRACTICAL INFORMATION

This is the 8th EURAM conference, and probably the biggest till date. It really is huge, with
nothing less than 8 general tracks ( on International Management, Strategy, Organization,
Human Resource Management, Leadership, Innovation, Marketing and Public
Management. Each track represents itʼs own series of academic paper presentations,
where each paper has gone through a reviewing process, managed by the chair(s) of each

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

track. The innovation track for instance, was chaired by John Bessant and Bettina von
Stamm, who together had peer reviewed and accepted a total of 20 papers to be
presented by their authors over the three day conference.

Besides the eight general tracks at EURAM, there were nothing less than 34 different
more specific tracks, many of which addressed different aspects of diversity and diversity
management, since that was the overall topic of this yearsʼ conference. For a list of all of
the conference tracks, please visit www.euram2008.org. In total we were approximately
1000 conference participants, with more than 540 papers being presented.

I personally found that there was too big of an overlap between the many tracks, which
meant that very often there were very similar topics being addressed at the same time by
different researchers, who would - in my humble opinion - have benefitted from being in
the same room, instead of being spread so relatively thinly between the more than 40
tracks. In some of the tracks there were only relatively few participants, and I think the
quality of not the discussions would have benefitted from a reduction in the number of
tracks.

It was a great conference and I learned a lot, but I could have learned much more if I did
not have to run around like a maniac between all of the different tracks that I was
interested in.

That was the short introduction to the overall conference, the rest of the notes reflect the
choices I made in terms of which presentation and tracks I decided to pursue during the
two days that I was there - and the campus of Ljubljana University in the heart of Slovenia:

Introducing the innovation track by Bettina von Stamm

Dr. Bettina von Stamm and John Bessant (Imperial College) are hosting the innovation
track, and Bettina opens the track on Thursday morning with a presentation of some of the
dominating trends in the field of innovation (both theory and practice) right now.

Trends in innovation right now according to Bettina von Stamm:

• Open innovation
• User-led innovation (von Hippel)
• Discontinuous innovation (From Schumpeter to Clayton Christensen
• innovation with a new purpose

Von Stamm also shared some of her observations about how different aspects of work life
are and have been dramatically changing in the last couple of decades - and in the table
below she illustrates this shift between the past and the present / future:

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

Aspects of work life Past Present / future

Time horizon For life project-based

Loyalty is to company self

career progression deep expertise several knowledge sets

time served results based
linear non-linear
working the hierarchy working the network

Network internal external

how to get things done tell people persuade people

communication monologue dialogue

focus internal external

solutions black & white no one right way

learned knowledge constructed insight
single loop learning double loop learning

education technical skills social skills

Source: Bettina von Stamm

If we are really coming to an environment where we are managing ourselves in a

completely different social context - our next big challenge is to understand how to
manage innovation in this completely different context.

Von Stamm ends her brief presentation by introducing the seven overarching themes in
the innovation track, which also represents the program for the next couple of days:

TRACK OUTLINE:
Session 1: The context for creating ideas
Session 2: Collaborating for innovation - the project level (my presentation is here)
Session 3: Discontinuities - did you see it coming?
Session 4: Discontinuous innovation
Session 5: Service innovation
Session 6: Moving towards open innovation
Session 7: Supplier relations and public sector innovation

=> SESSION 1: THE CONTEXT FOR CREATING IDEAS:

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

Jan Dul and Canan Ceylan:

Cross-National comparison of the organisational climate for creativity
Jan starts out with a great video clipping of a crow picking out a thing from a very thin
bottle with stick as a tool, which shows how incredibly creative even a crow can be if the
purpose is important enough. And he uses this video to let us know, that if animals can be
this creative, then we as human beings definitely can too . We all can - if we are given the
means to do it, and more importantly, if we are in the right context.

“All innovation begins with creative ideas - and creativity is a necessary, but not sufficient
condition for innovation (Amabile et al, 1996)... So the basic statement by Dul and Ceylan
is that employee creativity is an underutilized resource for innovation. Some organizations
understand that: he mentions 3M, Google (“where each employee is a hands-on
contributor”) etc, but so many other organizations do not understand this,

Creativity is also an invidual process - which is again affected by the climate in the work
environment: The perception of an employee that his / her work environment is supportive
for creativity.

The climate thus affects creativity through the organizational environment which consist of
the managerial / leadership environment AND the physical environment. Most of existing
theory on creativity is focused on these two aspects - but Dul and Ceylan instead focused
on the individual creativity within the organizational context

Measurement for creativity: Existing instruments for measuring creativity include: KEYS -
78 items (Amabile et al, 1996), CCQ - 50 items (Ekvall, 1996); and SOQ - 50 items
(Isaksen et al, 1999). The problems with these existing measures were - according to Dul
& Ceylan far too time consuming, so instead they developed a new measurement
instrument, which they called CDSQ, where they identified 9 different organizational
characteristics of importance, where they looked at 11 physical characteristics; where they
study both interior design and building design.

Main questions addressed: How important do you consider each factor to support your
personal individual creativity? They now have more than 1000 people in their database,
spread over a lot of different countries, also to understand the cultural differences in terms
of creativity. The aspects in general that seemed most important were:
• recognition of creative ideas
• challenging job
• time for thinking
• autonomy in job

When it came to the national differences Dul & Ceylan compared data between NL,
Turkey, Brazil, and Japan - but he questions whether the differences actually represent
cultural differences or other differences.... Because maybe our “scoring style” is just
different .... In a study by Harzing (1996), where she studied cultural differences in
response style and found them to significantly impact survey results.

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

That is an interesting paper, which is actually downloadable online - so if you

are interested you can find it at: http://www.harzing.com/download/paucity.pdf

Could economic differences between the countries maybe explain for some of the
differences between the countries? They wanted to take that into account also, and they
therefore also included data on the differences in GDP between the countries involved in
the study... Could The Hofstede dimensions of collectivism vs individualism maybe help
us explain these differences?

Conclusions: Dul & Ceylan were overall pleased with the CDQS as a practical instrument
to measure both organisational and physical characteristics of the climate for creativity.
Organiational characteristics are in general considered more important than physical
characteristics. Recognition of ideas seems to be universal aspect that is considered most
important in all countries.

Angelika C Bullinger
Idea Assessment and Selction in Technologically driven SME
The early stages of the innovation process - eg the fuzzy front end: Bullinger describes the
structure of the fuzzy front end, where it is incredibly important to make the right decisions
on account of existing ideas. This is research in the search to identify the best way of
conducting idea assessments in corporation, based on studies of three different
companies.

Previous research mentions different numbers of assessment with different degrees of

details, and among the set of scholars who judge assessments beneficial, a number of
common characteristics have emerged. The companies involved in the study were all
industrial, and Medium-sized companies. Bullinger interviewed primarily members of the
board of directors, and asked them to explain as best they could the decision process they
went through for idea assessment purposes.

All three companies are market leaders in each of their markets, and are considered to be
highly successful in each of their respective industries. Bullinger explains how in one of
the companies (Hans Einhell AG) the ideas are presented to the department of marketing,
and they then decide whether they would go with an idea or not, which was very much of
an intuitive gut-feeling decision-making process.

Another company was almost the opposite (C&E Gein GMbH), as they had a strong
Stage-Gate process, but idea assessment is done internally. They were also characterised
by having medium weak ties to their customers and end-consumers, and strong ties to a
research institute. It was the board of directors (5 people) who made the decision
together.

The third company (Marquardt GmbH) is different, because they are very customer-
directed, customers are not driving the decisions, but they are certainly influencing the
decisions - so it is an interactive decision-making between the customers and the
company (testing).

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

Bullinger made a matrix between the structure (highly structured - low structure idea
assessment) and decision-making level (top management - lover level decision making).
She also made a distinction between core inside innovators (part of the innovation project),
peripheral inside innovators (within company, but not directly involved), outside innovators
(not part of the organization).

Björn Remneland (Göteborg University)

Dramatism as a way to understand entrepreneurship
The overall research question: how do entrepreneurs move from fuzzy front end to
innovation? First case is “Competence Arena West”, which was founded in 2003 in
Sweden to build a shared web platform for sharing competences and resources between
actors in the western region of sweden. They were funded by regional government.

The other case in Remnelandʼs study was Idebanken.se, which was founded in 2005 with
the aim to build a creative community for sharing ideas, giving solutions to each other etc.
The project was funded by “boot-strapping” and influenced by the ideology of Open
Innovation. This entrepreneur struggled a bit with the funding, because it was a reatively
front end project (similar to Facebook etc), but eventually they managed to persuade
government to sponsor the platform.

These two cases are interesting because they both sought to organize and mobilize social
networks, because in both of these cases the networks were not there from the outset,
they were being built in the process - so that was why Remneland ended op using more
entrepreneurial theory than actual network theory. Both cases are driven by strong
entrepreneurs, with strong rhetoric capabilities.

The methodological approach to this was to make interviews over time (almost a three
year period), in the beginning Remneland met with the entrepreneurs every week, later
every three weeks, for a period of three years. Interviewing them about their innovations,
the development, what they did and how the strategies were building up etc.

This approach is contrary to the normal way of studying entrepreneurship (and innovation)
where the usual approach tends to be the finding of a success story and then
subsequently ask the entrepreneurs to explain what happened, which will in general be
colored by the rational way of doing things, and normative in the sense that they tend to
think that they did the “right” thing. Remneland thus stressed the importance of studying
the iInnovation process in the making, as opposed to studying it retrospectively.
Remneland distinguishes between these two approaches here:

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

The normal way The alternative way

Retrospective In the making
Normative Descriptive
Looking for success-factors looking for drama and plot
Finding major turning-points Following the journey
Lifting up heroes Questioning myths
“What to do” “How they do”

“The irony is that when we turn to literature for guidance on how to identify new
organizations, our theories and definitions about organizations assume that they already
exist, that is, the starting point for our theories begins at the place where the emerging
organization ends” (Katz & Gartner, 1988:429)

Entrepreneurial projects are never stable: they are constantly influencing and being
influenced by the environment. They are dependent upon mobilizing a “critical mass” of
allies - both in number and passion. And they need to build the innovation (material level)
and describe its use (rhetoric level) in parallel processes.

Remneland used Burkeʼs pentad as his approach to structure his analysis:

Act What is the action? What is going on?
Scene When and where?
Agent What or whom is involved?
Agency How?
Purpose Why?

This is quite an interesting approach. You can learn more about Burkeʼs pentad
here: http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~johnca/spch100/5-3-burke.htm, here: http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatistic_Pentad, and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Dramatism, and here:

=> SESSION 2: COLLABORATION IN INNOVATION

Méanie Antoniene (HEC-Ecole lʼUniversité de Liège)

Interorganizational innovation projects and public policy
Collaborative R&D has become a central feature of public intervention regarding
innovation and regional development. Lillte is known about the management practices that
are appropriate in this context. Two case studies of projects financed by the Waloon
competitive clusters program, with 8 semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis.

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

The Alpha project is born from the connection between molecular biologists and medical
imagining specialists with the objective to identify new types of biomarkers for the in vivo
imaging.

The Beta project aims to develop and market an innovative vocal logistics solution of
higher quality than the one offered by the world leader in logistic interfaces. In contrast to
the Alpha project all of the project participants are involved in the decision making process.

Antoneine defines a dominating partner as a Meta-voice, which is a great

expression, I like that!

Susanne Justesen, INNOVERSITY RESEARCH

Innovation Management as Nexialism
My own paper presentation focused on innovation management understood as the ability
to ensure exchange and combination between multiple domains of knowledge. The
research evolves from a longitudinal, real-time study of innovation practice in six different
groups, and introduces a new approach to analyzing, and especially to managing group
diversity in innovation practice.

By applying a social constructionist approach, Justesen integrates social

psychology with innovation management theory and defines diversity as “the
availability and use of multiple knowledgeable identity domains”. By defining each
such domains as consisting of a unique set of perspectives and heuristics, coated
with an outer layer of identity; innovation is described as taking place when domain-
specific perspectives and heuristics are being exchanged and combined between
knowledge domains that have not previously been combined. The resulting
innovation practice itself is however only described as innovative, when such
combination represents a perturbation of the focal domain. Based on this approach
to the analysis of diversity in six different innovation groups, three types of
innovation practice were identified: Type 1) innovative innovation practice; Type 2)
not-innovative, but competence building innovation practice, and Type 3) neither
innovative, nor competence building innovation practice.

While describing all three types of innovation practice, Justesen in particular

focuses on innovative innovation practice (Type 1), and the role of innovation
management in managing innovation processes in practice. Another key finding in
relation to this shows how groups in this study were found to be actively
constructing diversity when innovation management was able to 1) ensure
awareness of available domains, 2) legitimize the relevant available domains, and
3) actively manage the construction of multiple domains. By relating these findings
to the allegory of nexialism, as it was introduced by sci-fi writer Ian Vogt in 1950,
the implications of these findings on the innovation management were analysed
and discussed.

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

Sabine Boerner, University of Konstanz (DE)

Leading creative minds
Boerners research question is described as: “Is leadership a leverage for enhancing R&D
team innovation?” A dance between transformational leadership research and R&D
innovation research.

Some of the characteristics of R&D team members, managerial requirements:

• High intrinsic motivation
• expert knowledge
• high need for autonomy
• low need for leadership

Transformational leaders should be characterized by:

• Charisma
• Inspirational motivation
• intellectual stimulation
• individual consideration

Empirical studies are very few, they only managed to find Keller (1992), Keller (2006) and
(on more).

Team innovation defined (West & Farr, 1990): Innovation comprises both the proposal and
application of new ideas, processes, products or procedures designed to significantly
improve......”

=> SESSION 3: DISCONTINUOUS INNOVATION

Bessant, von Stamm & Möslein

Selection strategies for discontinuous innovation
Some of the challenges in such strategies is the exploration vs exploitation. Exploration is
about experimentation and variation in routines, processes, technologies and applications
(March, 1991).

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

It does increase our ability to adapt to environmental changes by increasing variance in

these organisational attributes (McGrath, 2001)

There is a great article in the New York Times about innovation and brain
health - about how it enables us to make new changes at http://
www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/business/04unbox.html?
ex=1367553600&en=e1243d427937195c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=
permalink

The challenge - we need to develop: 1) dynamic capabilities (Teece, Pisano et al, 1997), 2)
let go of existing knowledge (Leonard Barton, 1995), 3) Enhanced absorptive capacity
(Zahra & George, 2002), and 4) new selection methods (which replace existing stage gate
processes).

This notion initiated a new research project: the Discountinuous innovation laboratory
(DILab) at www.innovation-lab.org, based in Denmark, UK and Germany - where they
divide the innovation process into 1) search, 2) selection and 3) implementation. The focus
of this paper is on the selection process, which was the overall theme of the DILab this
year (last year they focused on “search”.

Why ideas are usually rejected in the innovation process:

• It is not our business
• It is not business
• It is too big for us
• not invented here
• Invented here
• We are not cannibals
• Nice ideas but doesnʼt fit
• it ainʼt broke so why fix it?
• Great minds think alike
• Existing customers wonʼt want it
• We have never done it before
• we are doing ok as we are
• letʼs set up a pilot

This is why we need to set up different approaches to how we do our selection, because
the challenge is different when it comes to discontinuous innovation: it is put into a matrix
with on the y-axe it is the degree of innovation, and the x-axes is the height of
environmental complexity:

zone 1: Exploit: Incremental innovation in low-complexity markets (within established

frames of reference / environment)

zone 2: Bounded exploration: Radical innovation in low complexity environments

(established frame)

zone 3: Re-frame: incremental innovation in a highly complex market (new frame) -

bootlegging is similar to skunkwork, building on a story from BMW where a prototype

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

helped build a visual expression of what they wanted to do, which also helped the
selection process.

Zone 4: Co-evolve: Radical innovation in a highly complex environment (new frame). The
selection challenges in this zone are guided by emergence strategies, as it needs to co-
evolve with stakeholders, and “be in there, and be in there early and actively. The tools
and methods are about selection and amplification, proble and leardn, prototyping and the
use of boundary objects. Some of the enabling structures are outside agenst and
facilitators.

Habtay Solomon, University of Witwatersrand South Africa

From disruptive technology to disruptive business model innovation
A persistent problem: the dual challenges of managing both sustaining and disruptive
innovation simultaneously. Research questions: can a radical innovation cause disruption
to incumbents? Can disruptive innovation emerge initially in high end markets?

The study is primary based on a conceptual investigation of the literature, from which he
defines radical and disruptive innovation.

Essential definitions of disruptive innovation: “an innovation that introduces a new product,
process or business model which initially emerges in small low-end markets, but over time
displaces market incumbents by successfully replacing......

Characteristics of disruptive innovation:

- typically simpler, cheaper, and convenient to use relative to existing products
- Initially targets price-sensitive customers who were not able to use existing products

Can radical innovation actually cause disruption? Solomon identified sex different element
significant to the innovation process - and the degree to which it affects the
discontinuousness of an innovation:
1) Value propositions
2) Customers and markets
3) Value chains and value networks
4) Capabilities and resources
5) Strategy and organization
6) Financial resources

=> TRACK ON LEADERSHIP - FRIDAY MAY 16th

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

Roberto Quaglia & Paola Viotto (ESCP-EAP Italy)

A longitudinal study of Italian Top CEOs:
The focus is on the impact of individuals backgrounds and career choices and whether
there are drivers in an executives background, which may allow an individual to reach the
CEO position faster. They studied 40 CEOS of companies listed on the italian stock
exchange. On average they stayed in their CEO position for 5 years. 100 percent maile,
average age 55 (low 41 high 73).

Based on the literature review, they introduce four hypothesis: 1) international experience,
2) various companies, 3) various industries, and 4) holds a post-graduate degree. Re their
hypothesis: 1 was negative, 2 was negative and 3 was indifference and four was positively
confirmed.

They expected that international experience would be more important because that help
you manage also in an international organisation, but she suggests that part of the
explanation for it not having an effect could be that in Italy it is more important to have a
strong local network to become a CEO.

They also expected the shifting between different companies would be important, in their
sample they had worked for an average of 7.4 companies, where the same average in the
US and France is 2 different companies.

When regarding to third hypothesis on the different industries, the result netiher conformed
the hyp, nor disproved it; the two variables do not seem to be correcalted. Maybe having
experiences in many industries is a factor which, in Italy, is not valued as much as other
factors in the appointment of a CEO.

Having a post-grad degree results in a different correlation in comparison to previous

studies, such as Gottesman and Morey (2006), who argue that, for CEOs there is no
evidence that holding an MBA impacts the performance of their firm. The penetration of
postgraduate degree in the CEOʼs population may further increase, as 47% of CEOs
under 48 years old hold a postgraduate degree, versus only 24% of CEOs over 48 years
old.

Viotto is careful about making any recommendations on the basis of their research, due to
the limitations of the study in terms of the limited sample (40), the geographical focus
(Italy), and the sources (only secondary). Personal interviews with the CEOs would have
added useful insight for commenting on the results.

They also wanted to put their findings into perspective, by emphasizing that they refer to
careers which have developed over the past two or three decades, and are therefore, not
good evidence of the latest trends, which may well change the path to CEO in the future.
Quaglia furthermore argues that in Italy (a hypothesis) may be that the pressure towards
results is less important than trust (expected to stay with the company for longer).

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

In top 40 in Italy, there are no women CEO and only one non-italian (Irish), an one other
who is half italian and half canadian, but they consider him to be italian.

Could be quite interesting to make a big-scale comparison of the degree of

internationalization (diversity) in Top Management Teams in Europe? Maybe
similar to the analysis that I did on Top 100 TMTs in Denmark, which could be
turned into a bigger study on a broader scale in Europe? Hmmm, worth
exploring further

Béatrice Collin and Jeannine Routier Pucci

International Diversity Management: Operational keys/ insights
Managing diversity is an open, creative and interactive heuristic process which core
characteristics is to share and build on differences. Therefore, they consider international
managemtn as a discovery process in which being aware of difference, whatever these
differences may be, respecting them and valuing them, is the basic principle for building
relationships, partnerships and projects. Collin emphasized how the exposure to diversity -
whatever kind - can make quite a big difference.

Ichak Adizes (keynote):

Leadership, change management and diversity
Dr. Adizes is an expert on organizational performance and change. Over the past 35
years, he has worked with some of the world's largest corporations and consulted with
many heads of state. Dr Adizes is also a noted author and has lectured in in more than 40
countries.

Adizes describes how he was the very first to introduce a course on management.,
something he is very proud of. We need to build complementary teams, that is diversity -
he does not talk about gender, culture, etc - but he talks about diversity of styles. So the
masculine style can be represented by a masculine women and needs not be represented
by a male.

In Europe we have the advantage of multiple cultures, so now it is about time for europe to
develop our own management theory on diversity, because europe is fortunate having
multiple cultures that complement each other, but we need more knowledge about how to
manage for such european diversity. We need to develop a new framework, our own
framework here in Europe.

One of the very good points he made was that just because differences tend to bring about
conflict, that should not be a problem, why would it be. We should be used to dealing with
conflicts, we have them all the time, so where does this intolerance towards conflicts at

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

work come from? We should not make it such a big deal, because really - conflict is
normal, we experience it on different scales every day.

Where does this notion of harmony in the workplace stem from? There is no win-wing in
business life, you either win or you loose, so forget about harmony, because people ARE
different, and when we are different that brings about anything but harmony. Life is not an
exercise in harmony, so that need not be the ambition. Why would it be Yugoslavia and not
Switzerland that experienced war? It is all about respect. We can shout at each other with
respect, if we only recognize the sovereignty of the other party to think differently, you
donʼt have to think like me. You CAN learn a lot from someone who disagrees with you, if
you respect them.

Trust is a different matter. Win-win does not exist. There is no win-win. He uses the
example of conflict of the conflict we have within, just between the mouth and the taste-
buds and the brain as to whether to eat the cake or not. “30 seconds on the lips - 30 years
on the hips”, and there is only 15 cm between the brains and the mouth. So no wonder
that there is a conflict....

He has a hope that people here in Europe will start focusing on how to build interpersonal
relations that respect differences, because we trust and respect each other.

Interesting presentation, if you would like to know more about the methods,
tools and ideas of Adize, you can find them at www.adizes.com

Janez Potočnik (keynote):

Managing diversity: From Challenge to opportunity
European Commissioner for Science and Research shared his views and firsthand
information on the European research policies to foster diversity and European
competitiveness.

Janez is originally a Slovenian researcher and politician, with his education from Ljubljana
University. “The maximum of diversity within a minimum of space”. Operating on a
european scale means coping with diversity. Diversity can seem to be mainly a challenge,
but in fact it is also a great opportunity. It may lead to conflict, but with different skills and
expertise also produces important gains, which can be transferred into innovation and
other economic gains.

Janez Potočnik sees a lot of diversity in his own work as a commissioner, but is also very
concerned about the lack of for instance women in european boards of directors, which
remain in the single digit numbers. He is very much concerned with the abilities of us to
leverage diversity. In reference to the Lisbon Strategy, diversity is of still greater

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

importance. App 21 million euros were invested in different forms of research into the
study of diversity, which can be divided into two main themes: describing diversity and
linking diversity with different performance criteria. Theories on diversities started to
emerge in the 1980s within only the managerial field of research, but now it is studied from
a range of different perspectives and research traditions.

It is therefore important to identify the situations under which diversity management

thrives, and Europe should be at the forefront of this stream of research. In recent years a
dialogue between the commission and academia where we focus on many of the most
important issues of diversity. The EU is funding a lot of research in this field, and hopefully
some of this research will help us drive more innovation in Europe in the years to come.

We need to take pride of our unity in diversity in Europe, this conference shows how
european management theory and practice is important, not only in theory but also in
practice

=> SYMPOSIUM ON SERVICE INNOVATION

Johan Roos, Stockholm School of Economics

We all talk about innovation here at the conference, but surprisingly little has been said
about responsibility and innovation - which is something that Roos is taking an interest in.
He mentions examples from the US where big innovators later turn into big philanthropist,
notably Carnegie who spend much of his life polluting the world, to later than turn around
and try to save that very world as an philanthropist. But what are the consequences of
innovation of services, and the combination of strategy, services and innovation?

John Bessant mentions an example of a large pharmaceutical company funding research

on Diabetes in Tanzania, where Tanzania has serious problems with AIDS, where all of
their healthcare funding goes into curing and treating AIDS, and if there is anything left, it

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

will be used on tuberculoses - so a company can do a lot in Tanzania, where Diabetes is a

serious problem as well. Now being dealt with by a medical company.

According to Roos, one could actually think of CSR as a means for dealing with “failure” of
the local government, which should be dealing with many of the problems that many
companies are now starting to deal with.... But there is a lot of experience from Sweden,
where just giving away money, does not make a difference - what really makes a
difference is partnering, or loaning money to people instead of just giving away. It should
not be about charity, it should be about partnering - only that way can we really make a
difference.

John Bessant mentions how IBM is trying to establish themselves as the locus of service
science in the UK, but according to Bessant we should instead focus on the use of
services instead of focusing on the development of services. He mentions the use of
mobile phones in rural Kenya, were mobile phones are being used in completely
unexpected ways that Nokia is now beginning to learn from.

We are so good here in Europe at knowing what is going on in the US and copying it,
whereas we are very bad at knowing what each other are doing here in Europe. Service
science vocabulary has been captured and is mapped out and closely related to
enginerring and the IBM-agenda (Ruff).

Ann-Katrin Neyer:
EXPLORING INNOVATIVE SERVICE DESIGN THROUGH PROTOTYPING
Neyer introduces a matrix, with the degree of discontinuity on the bottom and the degree
of customer involvement on the other axes, and then potting in different methods for
prototyping: High on discontinuity and involvement are: experience prototype, service
scenario, lego, servlab.

Building on Thomke (1998:749) they developed a five-step process for service innovation:
1) analysis, 2) design and visualize the business ideas and concepts. The objective of this

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

phase is to develop and visualize concepts that hold promise of addressing an idea. 3)
build, is the phase of transformation of selected concepts into prototypes, models and
simulations. The objective of this phase thus is to stimulate interactions with stakeholders,
get early customer feedback and gain insights regarding uncertainties. Methods could be
service scenarios, lego, business theater with customers and interactive refinement. The
last and final phase is 5) Play, which is the test of prototypes in a real environment and
reflection of insights for next iterations, thus gaining valid and emotional feedback by
customers and adapting processes to achieve innovative forms of competitive advance.
Methods used in this phase could be servlab, experience prototyping, bnusiness theater
with customers, storytelling, customers observation and empathy and field interviews.

Another example presented by Neyer describes the Fraunhofer IAOs Servelab, which is a
unique laboratory where you can develop a visual example of different service designs.
This has for instance been used by the Accor Hotel Group, where they have tested their
different new ideas for check-in procedures by means of animation and testing to
(prototyping).

Key learnings from this project in the very early stages describe the best preconditions for
successful prototyping in service innovation work to:

- define what type of prototype helps to develop innovative services

- expect and plan for iterations

- let the customer get creative

Prototype service innovation helps to gain valid feedback to improve the service and avoid
costly service failures.

In the discussions following this presentation it is suggested that maybe we should not talk
about services or products anymore, because we see so many of the same things and
methods emerging within product innovation in manufacturing, because basically we can
define everything (product or service) by the degree of interaction with the “producer”. And
many of these methods are already there and have been there in the field of product
development, the strange thing is that they are not being used. We as a research
community should be so much better at seeing what they are already doing out there...

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

the example of Terminal 5 in Heathrow keeps popping up, where much of the tangible
design seemingly worked well, most of the problems resided in the lack of service design,
the service design that was overseen - such as how passengers would get from the
parking-lot to the terminal.

John Bessant remarks how much of the discussion here is about improving existing
services, so how about addressing the radical innovation of services - how do we do that?
What if we are to create something that simply does not already exist. Bessant also
mentions some work he is doing with the British Design Council on diabetes, here we are
looking for radical solution to highly important problem.

Those were my notes from this years EURAM conference, I hope you enjoyed
reading the content just as much as I enjoyed writing it! Please send an email to me
at susanne@innoversity.dk if you have seen things in that should be altered in the
notes. Now I will spend my last hours here in Ljubljana exploring the city and relax
my overstimulated brain-cells for a little while.....

Hvala lepa (thank you very much)

Susanne Justesen
INNOVERSITY RESEARCH

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Notes By Ph.D. Susanne Justesen, Innoversity Research

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