Rethinking Employee Contribution: A Framework for Promoting Employee-Driven Innovation

Finland is usually considered as one of the leading countries in innovation activity and policy. A new national innovation strategy, under the framework of "broad-based innovation policy", was approved in 2008 by the government. The strategy is based on the idea that the focus of innovation policy should be shifted increasingly to the promotion of demand and user-driven innovation, and the promotion of better balance between technological and non-technological innovations. Recent international evaluators, however, argue that the content of the new approach is still far from clear. This paper examines what broad-based innovation policy could be in practice by using the Tekes programme "Liideri Business, Productivity and Joy at Work" (2012-18) for the development of business through renewals in management, employee contribution and forms of working as an example. The paper focuses on the programme's conceptual framework for promoting employee-driven innovation (EDI). EDI is considered as a boundary-spanning object, which helps exceed some of the limitations inherent in two more traditional policy discourses, industrial relations-based workplace development and technology-oriented innovation policy, giving a new vigour to innovation policy thinking. The paper contains an analysis on employees' role in different approaches to productivity development and innovation, attempting to clarify the specific content of EDI. Thereafter, the paper tracks down the relationships of EDI with traditional workplace development and innovation policy and how employees' contribution is viewed in them. This is followed by a short presentation of the Liideri programme. In the following section, the programme's conceptual framework for the promotion of EDI is examined in greater detail. The paper deals separately with factors enabling EDI, EDI as a process and impacts of EDI. The paper suggests that the promotion of EDI needs to be closely interwoven with the development of management and raises also some critical viewpoints concerning EDI-promoting policy approach.