READI – A Study of the Requirements for Enabling and Achieving Employee-driven Digital Innovation

The Covid pandemic accelerated the digital transformation in most organizations, resulting in new work models requiring new digital infrastructure, tools, and methods. The innovation and adaptation of such digital technologies have become steadily more critical for organizational survival. Even before, internal pressure for innovation and external pressure from customers and suppliers alike fueled the initiation of various innovation endeavors to this day.

Examples are many at hand, such as open innovation initiatives where ideas and innovations are sought outside the organizational boundaries and the formation of smaller (digital) innovation units that spearhead transformation from the inside with agile approaches. Another stream of innovations that holds significant potential is the employees and members of an organization itself.
This concept is called employee-driven (digital) innovation (EDDI) and provides a variety of opportunities for organizations when facing the omnipresent challenges of digital transformation. EDDI refers to enabling and motivating employees to participate in innovation processes actively and contribute their creativity and (specialist) knowledge in order to tap innovative ideas that benefit their organization directly or indirectly, create an organization-wide innovation ecosystem, increase employee identification with the firm and foster them to improve their skills in various areas.
The student research project READI aims to capture state of the art in tools and methods used in the field of EDDI from a scientific and practical perspective. This state will be elaborated using data from a systematic literature review, panel-based quantitative surveys, and qualitative interviews with practitioners. The collected data will be used for the (problem) description and design science-based development of meta-requirements and design principles of a central EDDI supporting IT tool. Broken down, the following two research questions were formulated and are being addressed:

1. Which requirements must be met by organizations in order to enable and positively influence employee-driven digital innovation?
2. What meta requirements and design principles can be derived for a central IT tool that supports the EDDI concept?

The results of the READI project are intended to provide (design) knowledge on how organizations can involve their employees in innovation processes and which (pre-)conditions must be met in order to create a suitable environment for this. The resulting design principles from the second research question support the development of a digital tool to primarily serve as an interaction channel between the organization and its employees. From a functional perspective, it should cover the capture and evaluation of ideas, the management, control, and documentation of these through implementation to integration, impact measurement, and communication, as well as foster the motivation of those involved. Digital access also creates the potential to cross organizational boundaries between departments and partners in an organization’s value chain to connect different innovation ecosystems within the framework of open innovation approaches. The project thus pursues the goal of utilizing the dormant creative potential of employees and generally increasing their organizations’ innovative capacity to be “READI” for future challenges.

Studentische Forschungsgruppe

• Max Ludzay
• Josh Kaufmann

Mentor:innen

• Prof. Dr. Ingrid Schirmer
• Stephan Leible