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This paper focuses on employees’ motivation to participate in innovation at the workplace. The best arguments to persuade employees to renew their work were searched. According to the expectancy theory (Vroom, 1964), a plausible link must be perceived for a motivational state to arise. The paper investigated the perceptions that employees, team-leaders and directors have about the relationships between innovativeness and well-being.

The data consisted of thematic interviews with 14 persons from knowledge- and labour-intensive organisations in the public service sector. Data included material from directors, team-leaders and front-line workers. The theoretical model of Huhtala and Parzefall (2007) was applied to analyse perceptions about links between well-being and innovativeness.

Results indicated that all eight possible links between well-being and innovativeness were perceived as plausible. The most common views were that high innovativeness connects to high well-being and vice versa. Additionally, low well-being was seen to decrease innovativeness. All organisational levels of knowledge- and labour-intensive organisations shared these views. More specifically, the interviewees shared the view that participating in innovation activities gives the employee opportunities to influence one’s work, which in turn leads to well-being. Another commonly shared perception was that if employees were encouraged and praised for their efforts, innovativeness would increase. These provide plausible arguments for leaders to persuade employees to participate.

Practical advice about effective arguments for motivating employees is given: tell them that innovativeness is desired for, time and space is allocated for innovations, the amount of change will be managed, and the innovation activities present an opportunity to have voice.

This paper shows potential motivational trigger points for enhancing the interaction between well-being and innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a workshop process to enhance the learning of employee-driven innovating (LEDI) and to evaluate in multiple ways the practical effects of the LEDI process, which aimed to enhance the employee-driven innovation practices at workplace level in a public organisation. Although front-line employees are increasingly encouraged to participate in innovation, organisations lack multi-level knowledge on the practices, outcomes and effects of participation.

A six-month development process (LEDI) was conducted to empower front-line hospital support service workers to learn to innovate and to apply this in the services they provide. The process consisted of different themes: future visions, current services, creating new services and evaluations of ideas and innovation embryos. The multi-method evaluation of the process included pre-evaluation of the generated innovation ideas, a developmental evaluation of the selected innovation embryos, a follow-up evaluation of the innovation ideas and an evaluation of the organisational level effect via a quantitative survey.

The intervention process had positive effects on employee participation and learning to innovate. The conclusion of the four evaluations is that the LEDI process developed a new kind of agency among employees and enabled significant improvements to services. The evaluation of the organisation-level effect revealed that the process had also improved the views regarding preconditions for development.

The intervention method is a practical application of employee-driven innovation conception that is validated as practical and effective at workplace level. The process is a viable method for enhancing workers’ innovation-related learning in service organisations. The novelty of the method is based on the multi-disciplinary combination of approaches that consist of theories of practice-based innovation, expansive learning and emphatic human-centred service design.