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188 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

It is important, however, to retain a healthy scepticism about this rather
straightforward, functionalist equation between (more) knowledge and
(more) innovation (see debates in special issues of the Journal of Management
Studies, 2001; Journal of Information Technology, 2001). For example, from
the ‘knowledge as possession’ point of view (introduced in Chapter 1),
there is no particular reason, a priori, why innovation should follow from
increased quantities of knowledge – indeed, information overload might quite
conceivably reduce innovative capability (Schultze and Vandenbosch, 1998).
Equally, from a ‘knowledge as practice’ perspective, knowledge (or ways of
knowing) required to develop and implement innovation is often widely
distributed (amongst individuals, groups, organizations, even nations and
cultures). As the Medico example shows, and as we saw in Chapter 4, the task
of bringing this distributed knowledge together is time-consuming, difficult
and mediated significantly by relationships of trust and power – innovation
does not automatically result. These dynamics need to be considered carefully
in understanding whether and how knowledge can be managed to achieve
innovation.

>> WHAT IS INNOVATION?
Innovation is an extremely broad-ranging subject and we could not hope to
do justice to the numerous studies of it here (for good reviews of theories and
techniques, see Bessant et al., 2005; Conway and Steward, 2006; Hidalgo and
Albor, 2008; van der Panne, 2003; Pittaway et al., 2004; Slappendel, 1996;
Wolfe, 1994). Instead, we focus on outlining those theories and frameworks
that help us to understand the process of innovation, as it is the dynamic, social
and knowledge-intensive characteristics of innovation that pose the biggest
challenges for managing knowledge work. Thus we focus on the process of
innovation as ‘the development and implementation of new ideas by people who
over time engage in transactions with others in an institutional context’ (Van de
Ven, 1986, p. 591). This highlights the socially dynamic nature of innovation as
well as its context specificity.
The first point to note is that the innovation process entails a lot more
than just coming up with clever ideas (invention or creativity – covered in
Chapter 4) it is also about putting them into practice (implementation) and
about spreading them more widely (diffusion). Even well-known inventors –
such as Thomas Edison (with over 1000 patents), Emeline Hart (who patented
the first commercial oven in 1876) and Steve Wozniac (co-founder of Apple
and infamous computer hacker) – had large groups of people helping to move
their ideas into practice. Many inventions even spread and get used in ways quite
unforeseen by the original inventors. For example, Sir Alec Jeffries, the scientist
who invented DNA fingerprinting in 1984 warned recently how the huge
expansion of the UK national database to contain details of over 2.5 million
criminals could actually generate, rather than reduce, miscarriages of justice
(Bennetto, 2004). Simply focusing on innovation as invention is therefore a

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