1 Slow Innovation

Please do not quote from this paper without permission of the author(s) Abstract: Many innovation projects seem to be based on the idea that speed is good; that organizing pressure and moving quickly from idea to implementation is central to more and better innovation. However, many innovation projects—even though they may deliver technical inventions or small-scale pilots—fail to have significant and sustainable impact. We believe that too much focus on speed is one of the reasons for that; that an overemphasis on speed can hamper exploration, reflection and learning. Therefore, we propose slow innovation, in order to complement current approaches. Furthermore, we think of innovation processes as complex systems and explore ways to facilitate social processes, between the participants in innovation processes, and to foster joint exploration, reflection and learning. In this paper, we focus on one research programme by TNO which aims to understand innovation processes and to organize these more effectively. Both authors plan to be working in that programme from 2011 to 2014 and will need to develop practical activities and ways of working—which informs our very practical research question: How can we attempt to organize slow innovation? We address that question by discussing some ideas of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey’s, especially his ideas on practice and theory, on experience and knowledge, and on inquiry and communication, and by developing guiding principles for slow innovation. Based on these guiding principles, we discuss a range of practical activities and ways of working for this research programme. We close the paper with discussing some ‘next steps ’ that we anticipate in further preparing this research programme