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Enterprises in the digital context attach importance to the participation of heterogeneous subjects in co-creation activities. As the core source of organizational innovation, employees are bound to assume responsibilities or provide role value in the process of digital innovation. While employee-driven digital innovation frameworks are being explored, together with research on employee innovation behavior mostly focusing on the “net effect” of single-level variables on outcomes.

Following the interaction logic of employee level and organizational level, this study applies ability, motivation and opportunity (AMO) theory and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to explore the influence of various digitization related factors' conditional configuration on employees' digital innovation behavior.

The results indicate that type of “self-motivation with multiple supports”, “organization-driven with digital oriented” and “digital-driven with ambidextrous complementary” constitute the configuration that drives high digital innovation behavior, while type of “cognitive deficit with environmental slack” and “fuzzy motivation with opportunity misapplication” constitute the configuration that drives nonhigh digital innovation behavior.

This conclusion enriches the theoretical research on digital innovation that regards individuals as action potentials and provides important guidance for how to cultivate and activate employees' digital innovation behaviors in management practice.

This paper aims to examine employee-driven innovation (EDI) intertwined with learning, creating a new description combining these two concepts: employee-driven learning and innovation (EDLI). This paper provides insights into the nature of EDLI based on the existing theories and perspectives. It seeks to elaborate EDLI as an ongoing process in and through work.

The paper draws on Jaakkola’s (2020) guidance for structuring a conceptual article. The authors first describe the theoretical starting points related to EDI and then elaborate its relationship with learning at work, with the aim of structuring the key elements involved, drawing on and interpreting existing theory and knowledge.

In summary, advanced here are five premises for describing EDLI at work: (1) EDI and workplace learning are strongly intertwined phenomena, (2) learning in the EDI process occurs simultaneously at the intra-personal and inter-personal levels as a reciprocal process of adaptive and innovative learning, (3) innovations are only manifested in and are relevant to the specific cultural-historical and social context of particular enterprises, (4) the continuity of innovations and learning processes is enabled by participation and (5) triggers from outside the workplace, behind the innovation and the specific consequences (that transcend workplace boundaries) of the innovation anchor aspects of the process outside the workplace or work practice.

The paper advances a description and justification of EDLI. As such, it extends, connects and updates previously established theoretical models and explanations of this about EDIs. Based on the premises advanced here, the theoretical and practical contributions are discussed and the research gaps and needs for further research identified.

The purpose of this study is to examine learning and employee-driven innovation (EDI) in the public sector, with a particular focus on the interplay between employee engagement and organisational conditions.

The material consists of qualitative interviews with 23 participants from three municipal sites of innovation support that participated in a national programme aiming to strengthen municipalities’ innovation work.

The study found numerous constraining organisational conditions resulting in consequential loss of employee engagement for EDI. The conclusion drawn is that employee engagement and enabling organisational conditions are central to EDI in public sector workplaces, and that incorporating EDI into municipal daily operations requires paying attention to the interplay between organisational conditions and employee engagement.

This paper provides important guidance for supporting EDI in the public sector. Implementing EDI into operations requires employee engagement to be successful. However, employees’ engagement should not be overlooked or taken for granted. A practical implication of this study is that EDI in the workplace must be encouraged by creating a learning environment that supports innovative learning in the workplace. In practice, measures should be taken to support employee engagement by creating organisational conditions that provide a more expansive learning environment to ensure the continuity and perpetuation of EDI in public sector organisations.

The need for accelerating innovation is exacerbated as organizations struggle to either adapt or perish in this unforgiving condition due to the COVID-19 disruption. To address this issue, many organizations have embraced employee-driven participatory innovation to survive and thrive albeit the uncertainties. This study aims to investigate the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in supporting and facilitating these efforts.

This study first identified the underlying mechanisms that allow ESM use to foster and maintain participatory innovation and then reexamined how these mechanisms played out during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. The data was collected through a questionnaire in two phases, before and during work-from-home mandates, and the results were analyzed and compared to capture similarities and differences.

The results revealed that innovation culture and management support mediated the effects of ESM use on three measures of innovation productivity in both conditions. Interestingly, the effect of ESM use was more prominent in driving innovation in the work-from-home condition. This effect was not limited to the direct effect of ESM use on innovation productivity but on innovation culture and management support as well.

The results suggest that ESM offer a potentially useful path to support and enable employees to participate in the innovation processes, especially when they work remotely or in a distributed team. More generally, this paper should be of interest to researchers and practitioners interested in understanding, implementing and evaluating enterprise social software applications and encouraging employee-driven participatory innovation.

Enterprise social media (ESM) applications offer new opportunities for organizations to mobilize employees for open innovation, by promoting innovation beyond traditional R&D functions. Despite the popularity and success of these applications, current research has yet to fully explore the potential of ESM applications as a driver of employee-driven innovation, specifically through advancements in innovation culture. To fill this gap, this study proposes a theoretical framework that explains the role of ESM applications in facilitating employee innovation.

The authors administered a cross-sectional survey to collect data from professionals who use ESM applications regularly at work. Following a pilot study and instrument refinement, the authors conducted a field study to test measurement and the structural model by using the partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method.

The findings of this study support the validity of the proposed theoretical model. First, the results confirmed the three antecedents of ESM use for innovation: perceived innovation possibilities enabled by ESM technology, the expected value of ESM use for innovation and organizational support for using ESM applications for innovation. Next, the results confirmed the importance of ESM use in encouraging individual innovation productivity in terms of product/service innovation, process innovation and social innovation. Finally, the results corroborated the mediating role of risk-taking and knowledge-sharing culture in the use of ESM to increase innovation productivity.

The findings presented here have implications for theory and practices that would concern fostering a supportive environment and building an organizational culture that promotes employees' innovation behavior (internal open innovation) by using social technologies.

It is suggested that, to be successful, innovation teams should be small and consist of people with key expertise who want to participate and develop new solutions within their organisations. When it comes to conducting innovation work, I suggest shared leadership may be a factor influencing success. In this chapter, a theoretical framework is presented on the shared leadership of innovation teams. The key to establishing shared leadership in innovation teams is to plan for it as the team is created, not after the team has already been formed, as this may result in various problems in the intended innovation project. The proposed framework details key aspects to consider; some of which are related to external factors such as management and resources, and some to internal factors such as the team’s size, competencies, and their ability to develop norms and ways of working together. The proposed framework is applicable for managers, innovation leaders, and team members, and contributes to previous research on shared leadership and innovation leadership. Further research on the proposed framework is suggested.

Innovation is a process that enables organizations to sustain and prosper in a competitive business environment. This study aims to understand the key drivers of innovation within organizations from the lens of employees.

This study uses a grounded theory approach based on semi-structured in-depth interviews of 20 professionals working in information technology (IT) firms. Judgmental sampling was adopted to select the respondents. Open coding, inductive analysis was conducted on the interview transcripts to generate relevant themes.

Emerging themes indicate that innovation within organizations can be triggered as a response to client requirements or the employees’ inherent urge to innovate. Certain factors such as user engagement, formal organizational processes and practices, informal collaborative practices, the role played by experts and leaders and upskilling were seen to enable innovative outcomes within organizations.

Findings from this study will allow leaders to activate the identified drivers by designing suitable organizational processes and strategies to nurture a successful innovation culture within their teams.

This grounded theory-based study looks at drivers of innovation within IT organizations from the perspective of employees.

This study's purpose is to explore the difference in employee voice behavior along with its modalities and employee perceived control in a remote vs an in-office work situation.

Employees who worked remotely and in-person at a local municipal government in the Great Lakes Region of the United States were surveyed.

Findings suggest voice behavior and perceived control are stable attitudes and not impacted by a move from in-person to remote work. Participants indicated both Zoom staff meetings and Zoom one-to-one meetings with their supervisor were important; however, only Zoom one-to-one meetings with the supervisor were indicated to be satisfactory.

This study suggests that organizations considering moving some of their operations to a fully remote work situation would not experience differences in employee voice or perceived control. Implications related to utilizing specific communication modalities are also discussed.

This is the only study that focuses on differences in employee voice, its modalities and perceived control comparing in-person vs remote work.

We studied the relationship between job engagement and systematic problem solving (SPS) among shop-floor employees and how lean production (LP) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems moderate this relationship.

We collected data from a sample of 440 shop floor workers in 101 manufacturing work units across 33 plants. Because our data is nested, we employed a series of multilevel regression models to test the hypotheses. The application of IoT systems within work units was evaluated by our research team through direct observations from on-site visits.

Our findings indicate a positive association between job engagement and SPS. Additionally, we found that the adoption of lean bundles positively moderates this relationship, while, surprisingly, the adoption of IoT systems negatively moderates this relationship. Interestingly, we found that, when the adoption of IoT systems is complemented by a lean management system, workers tend to experience a higher effect on the SPS of their engagement.

One limitation of this research is the reliance on the self-reported data collected from both workers (job engagement, SPS and control variables) and supervisors (lean bundles). Furthermore, our study was conducted in a specific country, Italy, which might have limitations on the generalizability of the results since cross-cultural differences in job engagement and SPS have been documented.

Our findings highlight that employees’ strong engagement in SPS behaviors is shaped by the managerial and technological systems implemented on the shop floor. Specifically, we point out that implementing IoT systems without the appropriate managerial practices can pose challenges to fostering employee engagement and SPS.

This paper provides new insights on how lean and new technologies contribute to the development of learning-to-learn capabilities at the individual level by empirically analyzing the moderating effects of IoT systems and LP on the relationship between job engagement and SPS.