Participatory methods for initiating manufacturing employees' involvement in product innovation

Employee-driven innovation has the potential to improve product innovation by involving employees as innovative resources. However, it can be a challenge to turn the potential into a reality of collaboration practices across organizational structures and culture. Through an interactive research approach that we apply to two case companies, this paper presents an empirical study of how to initiate involvement of manufacturing employees in R&D activities. We have used participatory methods from design thinking that has the ability to create relations between employees from different backgrounds and through a series of facilitated workshops we have investigated how these methods can initiate employee involvement. We see that participatory methods can improve understanding and relation between R&D and manufacturing departments, and thereby support a creative collaboration and emergence of employee-driven innovation practices.