Official course description:

Full info last published 11/02-22
Course info
Language:
English
ECTS points:
7.5
Course code:
KBREINN1KU
Participants max:
140
Offered to guest students:
yes
Offered to exchange students:
yes
Offered as a single subject:
yes
Price for EU/EEA citizens (Single Subject):
10625 DKK
Programme
Level:
MSc. Master
Programme:
MSc in Digital Innovation & Management
Staff
Course manager
Associate Professor
Teacher
PhD student
Teacher
Associate Professor
Teacher
PhD student
Course semester
Semester
Efterår 2021
Start
30 August 2021
End
31 January 2022
Exam
Exam type
ordinær
Internal/External
ekstern censur
Grade Scale
7-trinsskala
Exam Language
GB
Abstract

The goal of the course is to address the complex entanglements of IT, innovation and society.

Description

Innovation is promoted as a key ‘good’ in current society. Innovation is seen e.g. as a way in which to save the welfare state, and innovation guides the allocation of major investments in research and development across the private and public sectors on both a national and international level. Therefore it is important to be able to both constructively and critically engage with innovation in both theory and practice.

Reassembling innovation will provide students with a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological tools to constructively and critically address innovation. Along with the theoretical exploration, emphasis will be also given on the organizational strategy and design within open ecosystems. In this emerging era of decentralization and networked collaboration, reassembling the pieces of innovation is an imperative for all types of organizations (private, public, NGOs and social enterprises). The course will, among other things, enable students to reflect upon your own role as active participant in future technological and societal developments, as well as to reflect on the politics and values embedded in the design and use of technologies.

The course will address topics such as Innovation models, innovation in science and technology, performativity of innovation science and models, innovative commons, organizational design in distributed innovation systems, critique of innovation, employee driven innovation, scaling innovation, innovation & politics.

Formal prerequisites
Intended learning outcomes

After the course, the student should be able to:

  • Discuss classical and modern theories of innovation including their relevance for analysing the development of information and communication technologies.
  • Analyse and critically reflect over the challenges and complexities of innovation including issues of governance, regulation, power, ethics and politics
  • Apply different perspectives within the sociology and economics of science and innovation to particular cases.
  • Put into perspective the different concepts, tools, business models and theories related to openness and open innovation appreciating the wider socioeconomic context.
  • Reflect upon the practical implications of innovation strategies and models with a focus on insights from contemporary organizational settings.
  • Situate innovation within political economy and power politics.
Learning activities

Teaching will consist of a mixture of lectures, video screenings and exercises while the students will investigate historical or topical cases that problematize the complex relationships underlying the innovation making process. Lectures provide theoretical foundations and walk-through examples of the entanglement of society with innovation development. The course will be taught as a lecture where the teacher will steer the discussion, but the students are expected to actively participate and co-create the lecture. The exercises focus on students discussing and applying the central concepts in group work, role play, student presentations, lectures, feedback, plenum debate, applied research, social media experiments and in writing. It will therefore be a combination of instructor-led sessions, small group discussions and exercises. It is highly recommended that students participate actively in the different elements of the lecture (preparation, online discussions, discussions in the lectures and exercises). 

Intended learning outcomes 

After the course, the student should be able to: 

  • Apply relevant theories and perspectives from the course to analyse particular cases.  
  • Discuss and combine different theories on innovation including their relevance for analysing the development and/or application of information and communication technologies.  
  • Reflect upon the practical implications of innovation strategies and models with a focus on insights from contemporary organizational settings.  
  • Situate innovation within a historical, political, economic and/or wider organizational context.


Course literature

Winner, L., 2004. Do artifacts have politics. Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, pp.251-263.

Godin, B. G. (2015) Models of innovation: Why models of innovation are models, or what work is being done in calling them models? Social Studies of Science 45(4), 570–596.

Hanson, M. J., & McNamee, D. J. (2000). Efficient reading of papers in science and technology. On line],< http://www. cs. columbia. edu/~ hgs/netbib/efficientReading. pdf.

Woolgar, S., Coopmans, C. and Neyland, D., 2009. Does STS mean business?. Organization, 16(1), pp.5-30.

Shin, Dong-Hee, et al. "Understanding the Internet of Things ecosystem: multi-level analysis of users, society, and ecology." Digital Policy, Regulation and Governance 19.1 (2017): 77-100.

Mallard, Alexandre, Cécile Méadel, and Francesca Musiani. "The paradoxes of distributed trust: Peer-to-peer architecture and user confidence in Bitcoin." Journal of Peer Production 4 (2014): 10. Available at:  http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-4-value-and-currency/peer-reviewed-articles/the-paradoxes-of-distributed-trust/

Callon, M. "Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics, in Callon M.(ed.), The laws of the markets, Oxford, Blackwell." (1998). Introduction

Graeber, David. Debt-updated and expanded: the first 5,000 years. Melville House, 2014. Chapter 2 The Myth of Barter, pp. 21-41

Earle, Joe, Cahal Moral, and Zach Ward-Perkins. The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts. Oxford University Press, 2016. Chapter 1 and 2, pp. 7-60

Allen, Darcy, and Jason Potts. "How innovation commons contribute to discovering and developing new technologies." International Journal of the Commons 10.2 (2016).

Brian, Martin. "From capitalism to commons". Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, 64.5 (2015)

Mason, Paul. "The end of capitalism has begun." The Guardian 17.7 (2015). Available at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun 

Star, Susan Leigh. 1991. Power, technologies and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions. In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, redigerad av J. Law. London: Routledge, pp. 26-56. 

Bowker et. al. (2009). Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment. In J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup, & M. Allen (Eds.), International Handbook of Internet Research (pp. 97–117). 

Fagerberg, J.(2004). Innovation a guide to the literature. In:Fagerberg,J.,Mowery,D.C.,Nelson,R.R.(Eds.),Oxford Handbook of innovation.Oxford University Press, Oxford. 22 pages 

Schumpeter, J.A. (1947). The creative response in economic history.The journal of economic history,7(2),149-159. 

Garud, R., Gehman, J., Kumaraswamy, A., & Tuertscher, P. (2016). From the process of innovation to innovation as process. The SAGE handbook of process organization studies, 451-466. 

Kanter, R. M. (1988). When a thousand flowers bloom: Structural, collective, and social conditions for innovation in organizations. Knowledge Management and Organisational Design, 10, 93-131. 

Meijer, A. J. (2014). From Hero-Innovators to Distributed Heroism: An in-depth analysis of the role of individuals in public sector innovation. Public Management Review, 16(2), 199-216. 

Buur, J., & Matthews, B. (2008). Participatory innovation. International Journal of Innovation Management, 12(03), 255-273. 

Kornberger, M. (2016). The visible hand and the crowd: Analyzing organization design in distributed innovation systems. Strategic Organization 

Chesbrough, H. (2020). To recover faster from Covid-19, open up: Managerial implications from an open innovation perspective. Industrial Marketing Management, 88, 410-413.

O Reilly, C. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2004). The ambidextrous organization. Harvard business review, 82(4), 74-83. 

Birkinshaw, J., Zimmermann, A., & Raisch, S. (2016). How do firms adapt to discontinuous change? Bridging the dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity perspectives. California Management Review, 58(4), 36-58. 

Hanseth, O., & Bygstad, B. (2015). Flexible generification: ICT standardization strategies and service innovation in health care. European Journal of Information Systems, 24(6), 645-663. 

Trischler, J., Johnson, M., & Kristensson, P. (2020). A service ecosystem perspective on the diffusion of sustainability-oriented user innovations. Journal of Business Research, 116, 552-560. 


Student Activity Budget
Estimated distribution of learning activities for the typical student
  • Preparation for lectures and exercises: 10%
  • Lectures: 40%
  • Exercises: 15%
  • Exam with preparation: 35%
Ordinary exam
Exam type:
C: Submission of written work, External (7-point scale)
Exam variation:
C11: Submission of written work
Exam submission description:
The exam will be a 7-day exam.
At the beginning of the exam three cases will be released, and students will be asked to choose one of the three cases for their exam report. Students will problematize one theoretical framework in-depth, or synthesize a theoretical narrative by cherry-picking concepts from course literature.
The final report should be no more than 5 pages.


reexam
Exam type:
C: Submission of written work, External (7-point scale)

Time and date