Knowledge productivity research at Habiform

Our research team consists of Paul Keursten, Marloes van Rooij, Joseph Kessels and Suzanne Verdonschot. In our research programme, we are exploring how to stimulate and support the learning processes an organisation needs for the improvement and innovation of its products, services and processes. The key questions of this research are:

1. Which learning processes contribute to improvement and innovation of operating procedures, products and services?
2. Which variables promote or inhibit these learning processes?
3. How can these learning processes be stimulated by targeted interventions?

In this research we collaborate with Habiforum and the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Habiforum is a network for innovative space-use in the Netherlands.

--> Innovative land-use
The Netherlands is a small country with many people. Innovative land-use is about finding ways to use the little space in an optimal way by combining the various functions it needs to fulfil such as living, working, leasure, transport etc. Habiforum started a programme for this. They believe that the shortcomings of the present manner of planning and design are so great that an innovation of the system of spatial planning and design is necessary. According to Habiforum, a different, innovative approach is needed. They use communities of practice ('proeftuinen') as a way of working. Within such a community public and private parties collaborate in order to solve a concrete project concerning spacial planning in the Netherlands. By means of joint workshops, creative exercises, and shared designs, innovative solutions are brought about. These communities of practice form the cases that we study in our research on knowledge productivity at the moment.

Phase A: Development of a conceptual framework

A literature research that builds upon previous research on knowledge productivity resulted in a theoretical framework. Within this framework we distinguish the following elements:

• Outcomes for the organisation
• Knowledge processes
• Competency development
• Work environment
• Context
• Interventions

Phase B: Testing the conceptual framework
We tested the conceptual framework by studying 16 improvement and innovation practices deployed in various organisations in the Netherlands, China and Indonesia. We reconstructed the process of knowledge creation and utilisation that brought about improvements and innovations. Interviews were held with the people who were involved in the innovation process. The concepts within our conceptual framework formed the basis for data gathering and analysis. From these studies, we learned that the various concepts we used to describe the process of knowledge productivity in our conceptual framework, do actually matter in innovation processes in practice.

Phase C: Explorative and inductive research to find key factors
In the previous phase we used the concepts from our conceptual framework as the starting point for data-analysis. The results confirmed the relevance of our framework. In this phase we did explorative and inductive case study research to trace the factors that promote and inhibit the process of knowledge productivity. We deliberately chose not to start from our framework. This meant that we studied all facets of the innovation process in 9 cases at Habiforum. And, in addition we executed an extensive literature review. This enabled us to identify factors that were not yet in our conceptual framework. We formulated the factors in the form of design principles:

1. Formulate an urgent and intriguing question
2. Creating a new approach
3. Working from individual motivation
4. Making unusual combinations of subject matter expertise
5. Working from mutual attractiveness
6. Starting from strengths
7. Learning by creating something together
8. Enticing to see new signals and to give them new meaning
9. Connect the world inside the practice to the one outside the practice
10. Make it a social and communicative process
11. Support actively the development of seven key competencies

Phase D: Validation of the design principles
In this phase, we brought back the principles to the same innovative practices we found them in. We interviewed 12 facilitators and asked them to describe the innovative practice they were involved in, in terms of the design principles.
This resulted in a description of nine innovation practices in terms of the design principles, enrichment of the principles and redefinition of one of the principles. The result was a set of eleven design principles: the 11th and the 1st principle were merged.

Phase E: Developmental research in various practices at Habiforum
At the moment we are busy with a developmental research in which we work with various communities of practice at Habiforum. We actively work with the design principles in order to learn more about their underlying concepts, their practicality and the competences that are needed to work with them.
The research cycles that we go through consist of the following phases:

1. One researcher sits together with the facilitator of a community of practice. We ask the facilitator: Which of the design principles would you like to work with? What is the question at hand in your innovation practice?
2. Together we design an intervention that meets this question.
3. The facilitator, either with help from the researcher or someone else experiments with this intervention.
4. We evaluate how it worked out. What mechanisms appear? What aids arise from this?