Organizational Innovations and Their Role in Finnish Companies' Renewal processes

Innovation research has mainly focused on understanding and measuring technological change, which allowed an only superficial impression about micro-level processes and organizational forms that produce new technological products and processes as well as services. While research on organizational innovations has grown recently, the phenomenon has remained deficiently understood. The literature is aware of the fact that the creation and diffusion of new organizational forms is a multi-level process; the various approaches in the field, however, remain theoretically separate. The purpose of this study is to increase our understanding of the phenomenon of organizational innovation, its clustering in interrelated systems, its relationships with other dimensions of business restructuring and its impact on companies' techno-economic performance and human resources issues. More precisely, the project has the following objectives:

1. to identify different types of organizational innovations, their interrelationship within clusters of change and their diffusion throughout the economy;

2. to analyse management strategies, workers' influence on organizational change and the relationships between organizational innovation and the quality of working life;

3. to analyse the impact of different patterns of organizational innovations on firms' techno-economic performance.

The project is carried out in Work Research Centre, University of Tampere. The research work will focus on Finnish firms in the field of machine building, electronic equipment, wood-processing industries and chemical industries. The project co-operates with a number of leading European institutes in the field of organizational innovations. Thus, there are good options toproduce empirical findings that are comparable with those produced in other countries.

Project leader:
Professor Gerd Schienstock
Mailing Address:
Work Research Centre
FI-33014 University of Tampere
Finland
Email: gerd.schienstock(at)uta.fi
Tel: +358 3 3551 7202