The fascinating aspect of “real” radical innovations does not primarily lie in their manifestations as entirely new services or products; what is of interest are rather the “mental innovations” and the “organically grown”, yet radically new forms and processes of knowledge (creation) having led to these manifestations. How can they be brought about?
We are proposing an alternative approach and knowledge technology to (radical) innovation (having been developed by M.Peschl and T.Fundneider): emergent innovation and enabling spaces.
Sometimes, (radical) innovation is the result of a brilliant idea which came up by chance. In most cases, however, a long process of brainstorming sessions, quantitative idea production, idea selection, market research, etc. has led to that innovation. Normally, these processes are based on the assumption that radical innovation is based on “far out”, “creative”, and completely orthogonal ideas (grafted onto the business from the outside), on a high quantity of -- in most cases low quality -- ideas going through a rigorous selection/evaluation process, etc.
The concept of emergent innovation follows a radically different approach: it is a socio-epistemological technology focusing on the cognitive processes leading to a new type of innovation (process). The core idea is that this kind of innovation emerges out of a process of both profound understanding of the innovation-object and reflecting and letting-go of predefined patterns of perception and thinking (compare also U-Theory). This leads to radical, yet “organic innovation” in the sense of both respecting and developing the core/essence of the innovation-object (be it a business, service, product, idea, etc.). This socio-epistemological technology of emergent innovation is a highly fragile and intellectually challenging process which has to be held in a container which we are referring to as enabling space; it is a multi-dimensional space enabling and facilitating these processes of knowledge creation. This enabling space comprises of a physical, social (trust, etc.), mental/cognitive, epistemological, as well as technological dimension. The following points have turned out to be crucial in our approach to innovation:

• * Focus on processes of cognition and perception as well as changing them profoundly (via techniques of radical reflection, questioning, dialogue, deep observation, etc.).
• * Primacy of profound and holistic understanding of the innovation subject/object as opposed to the production of a high quantity of ideas with relatively low quality.
• * Focus on the process of emergence of innovation and on enabling this process (instead of imposing or forcing it; “enabling space”).
• * Seeing, profoundly understanding, and respecting what is (already) there — understand what is already there as a chance rather than an obstacle.
• * “Organic radical innovation”: Respecting and at the same time exploring and developing the most radical and unforeseen potentialities of the (profound understanding of the) core/essence of what is already there. In this sense this is a kind of “radical innovation from within”.
• * Thinking innovation from the future potentialities instead of repeating and extrapolating patterns from the past. The question “what wants to emerge” is a pointer into the future and implicitly instructs the whole process of emergent innovation/knowledge creation.

Several innovation projects have proven that this socio-epistemological technology can be applied in a wide field of industries, sciences, etc. Still, there are many points to be developed and refined in this project.

Presenters:
Markus F.Peschl | http://www.univie.ac.at/wissenschaftstheorie/peschl/index_english.html
Thomas Fundneider | http://www.tfc.at | http://blog.fundneider.de/