Building a Dolmen: An ISD Approach to the Management of Innovation

Abstract. This paper addresses a “challenge in practice ” by describing the initial stage of an information systems development (ISD) project to support the management of innovation within a subsidiary of APC-MGE. To begin with, a review is presented of relevant literature on the management of innovation and on information systems development. The background of the case study is outlined and the advantages of a dialogical action research approach to ISD are discussed. Then the development of a conceptual model using the organizational analysis approach of Multiview2 is described. The work proposes to make a contribution in a number of areas. Firstly it provides empirical evidence of the role of innovation in an organ-izational transformation and the challenge of designing an information system to support this objective. Secondly it presents an example of using dialogical action research, recently intro-duced to the MIS discipline by Mårtensson & Lee, to develop an information system. Future work will involve tracking the implementation of the concept in order to evaluate its impact on the organization.