With the help of a qualitative case study and existing literature from scientific fields like social sciences, psychology, policy studies, and innovation studies a research framework was compiled for studying imagination as a driving force for innovation fueled by its social context. A try-out of this research framework suggested the result of this graduation project is a promising step towards the development of a tool that helps to identify and facilitate the imaginative needs of individuals to engage successfully in inter-organizational innovation projects, if it can be merged with work on organizational culture and personal decision styles.
This research framework has four levels:
1.The description of the main concepts innovation, inter-organizational collaboration, and imagination. The innovation considered in this research is process innovation from existing companies (a category that fits most innovation projects driven by CSR-policies). Innovation in an inter-organizational network is described as a complex decision-making process, and imagination as a driving force for innovation is described as providing a mental image of the innovation at hand that is well-developed in a creativity dimension and an emotional dimension, which provides the flexibility, holism, and motivation for action that is needed to develop and implement and innovation successfully.
2.A conceptual framework that ties together these main concepts. This level is built upon a conceptual framework from social psychology that links stimuli from the social context to behavior from the individual via a black box of cognitive processes and a mental representation. Based on the empirical research, this conceptual framework is extended with an additional pathway between stimuli from the social environment and behavior, and with other ‘destinations’ for the results of the cognitive processes than just the mental representation of the current innovation project.
3.A layered operationalization of the four elements in the conceptual framework. To operationalize the stimuli from the social environment, the concepts arena games (from policy studies) and network structure (from group dynamic theory) are used. For the operationalization of the mental representation, five imaginative qualities are determined. Three of them are creative and increase the flexibility of the individual’s innovative action, and two of them are emotional and increase the motivation for action of the individual. The operationalization of the cognitive processes and the behavior of the arena attendees emerged from the empirical data, just like additional layers of operationalization for the other elements of the conceptual framework that are probably more specific for the specific research context of this graduation project. The cognitive processes are operationalized as a set of nested trade-offs that assess the quality and fitness of proposals concerning the innovation project that are done in the collaboration arena. If the final judgement of this assessment is positive, the proposal will become part of the mental representation. The differences and similarities perceived by an arena attendee between his own mental representation and the mental representations of his fellow arena attendees influence his behavior.
4.A description of how the operationalized constructs can be identified in the raw data.