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We present theoretical and empirical evidence challenging early studies that found unions were detrimental to workplace innovation. Under our theoretical model, unions prefer product innovation to labor-saving technological process innovation, thus making union wage bargaining regimes more conducive to product innovation than competitive pay setting. We test the theory with population-representative workplace data for Britain and Norway. We find strong support for the notion that local bargaining leads to product innovation, either alone or together with technological innovation.

Using a unique longitudinal survey of employers in the United States during the 1990s, this chapter examines the trends and factors associated with how businesses have invested in high performance workplace practices. The specific workplace practices examined include shared rewards, job rotation, workforce training, employee involvement in problem solving, and self-managed employee teams. The incidence and diffusion of innovative workplace practices such as these varies over time but not in a unidirectional way. Employers with a more external focus and broader networks to learn about best practices are more likely to have extensively invested in these types of workplace practices. The educational quality of the workforce and investments in physical capital, especially information technology, appear to be complementary with a range of workplace practices. However, the association between unionization and workplace practices is mixed. Unionized establishments are more likely to train their employees but nonunionized establishments are more likely to have engaged a higher fraction of their nonmanagerial workers in problem solving. Finally, for employers in the manufacturing sector, past profits tend to be positively associated with more extensive investments in high performance workplace practices.

This chapter presents a model of innovation in the public elementary schooling system by drawing on ongoing work on an “Educational Innovations Bank” in India, which seeks to make available a freely accessible forum for innovative teachers and a grassroots innovations resource for administrators. How do some teachers in government elementary schools, working in contexts of socioeconomic and educational deprivation, achieve their educational goals in spite of facing the same constraints as thousands of other teachers? What lessons do they offer for policy reform? The answers draw on the social entrepreneurship and workplace innovation literature to first locate the incentive for innovation in the social value that socio-educationally entrepreneurial and innovative behavior of teachers creates. Next, an examination is presented of how this social value leads to learning for an identity of competence, which in turn provides an incentive for further educational innovation. Finally, the evidence is presented to argue for policy entrepreneurship and a formal framework to help in the diffusion, adoption, and adaptation of both the enabling innovations that result from socio-educational entrepreneurship and the in-school or in-class educational innovations. Such a “bottom-up,” peer-learning-based approach to innovations that also “improve” provides a unique way of visualizing educational reform in resource-constrained public educational systems.

As a sector, higher education is at the low end of innovation rankings. The challenges we face – demographic, technological, political, and pedagogical – will require sustained innovation at a strategic level. Recent research with mature companies has identified exemplars in strategic innovation (e.g., O’Connor, Corbett, & Peters, 2018). This work explores whether – and how – higher education institutions might adapt insights from the corporate sector for strategic innovation in teaching and learning.

The introductory section provides an overview of the nature of strategic innovation (and why it is hard to sustain), strategic issues facing higher education, and the status and challenges of sustaining strategic innovation for teaching. The next two sections describe insights from research with corporate exemplars of sustaining strategic innovation. Each section uses a scenario from higher education as a proof-of-concept test to explore the application of the corporate sector insights for strategic innovation in higher education teaching and learning.

The final section of the chapter discusses the planned next steps to prototype and test adaptation of these corporate sector insights with institutional innovation leaders in higher education, as well as additional potential sources of insights (from other research in the corporate sector and from strategic innovation in the public sector).

Creativity and innovation have been buzzwords of managerial discourse over the last few decades as they contribute to the long-term survival and competitiveness of firms. Given the non-linear, causally ambiguous, and intangible nature of all innovation-related phenomena, management scholars have been trying to uncover factors that contribute to creativity and innovation from multiple lenses ranging from organizational behavior at the micro-level to strategic management at the macro-level. Along with important and insightful developments in these research streams that evolved independently from one another, human resource management (HRM) research – especially from a strategic perspective – has only recently started to contribute to a better understanding of both creativity and innovation. The goal of this chapter is to review the contributions of strategic HRM research to an improved understanding of creativity at the individual-level and innovation at the firm-level. In organizing this review, the authors rely on the open innovation funnel as a metaphor to review research on both HRM practices and HRM systems that contribute to creativity and innovation. In the last section, the authors focus on more recent developments in HRM research that focus on ambidexterity – as a way for HRM to simultaneously facilitate exploration and exploitation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

Organizational performance improves through several channels, including changes in efficiency, innovation and technological change. Most of the extant research has focused on overall performance, often measured by partial measures of productivity, with little attention given to the components of performance. The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of HR practices and unionization on one important channel – organization efficiency - as measured by technical and scale efficiency. Using French industry survey data, the paper shows that HR practices do influence efficiency, but this is moderated by the existence of unions. The results show a rather complex set of associations. We find robust results that show that in France, HR practices have a positive effect on scale efficiency but this effect is dampened in the presence of unions. On their own, HR practices have no effect on technical efficiency. However, some of the results suggest that HR practices can exert a positive influence when combined with unions.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the effect of culture on innovation within the workplace. Special attention has been paid to Middle East and North Africa (MENA) culture features and their impact on employees’ adaptation to the innovation within their organizations.

Approach/methodology: To achieve this objective, a theoretical study has been carried out. Given its popularity in culture-related research, the Hofstede model has been used to understand the specificities of MENA region culture. An extensive literature review has been employed to investigate the relationship between culture and innovation in the workplace.

Findings: Based on the relevant literature, it can be said that the country’s culture has a considerable impact on how the employees adapt to the changes within the workplace. Some issues of Arab culture that managers should be aware of and suitable solutions have been underlined to improve the adoption of innovation within the organizations in Arab countries.

Research implications: This study contributes to knowledge regarding the association between innovation and culture within the workplace in the MENA region. Findings provide straightforward ways for managers to improve the adaptation of their employees to the growing innovation required by the global market.

Originality/value: This study is among the earliest to focus on the association between innovation and culture within the MENA region. In addition, it is among the rare studies, which explore the main issues of Arab culture that make the adaptation to innovation a complex phenomenon that requires further efforts from managers for successful innovation performance. The limitations, as well as the future research pathways, have been mentioned at the end of this study.

This paper examines the influence of high performance work practices (HPWPs) and industrial relations (IR) on firm propensity for product and process innovation. The authors distinguish between two styles of workplace governance – democratic and autocratic – based on whether the management is willing to cooperate with workers’ representatives, and two styles of IR – participatory or advocatory – based on the extent of their influence. The estimates carried out indicate that HPWPs always have a significant and positive effect on both product and process innovation, while IR has a positive effect only in respect of product innovation, and provided the style is of participatory type. An interpretation of the IR effects could be that process innovation makes workers feel insecure about their jobs, while product innovation represents the path that can better protect workers’ prospects in an uncertain and unstable competitive environment. In respect of the style of IR, the effect is positive when workers’ representatives adopt a participatory role; the effect is instead cancelled out when employing an advocatory role. Participatory style IR is very likely to contribute to creating a positive attitude towards change, with workers willing to share the adjustment costs (such as learning new competencies), while advocatory style IR generates, in the minds of managers, a perception of the risk that investments in product innovation may turn into sunk costs for the firm through a likely appropriation of quasi-rent by workers (‘hold-up problem’).

Purpose – Structural embeddedness of social networks within and beyond work organizations has shown its association with the innovation at work for employees from literature. Structural embeddedness includes three dimensions: the diversity, density, and trust of accessed networks. This chapter attempts to compare how structural embeddedness mechanizes on innovation at work differently for employees in hi-tech and non-hi-tech sectors.Methodology/approach – We analyzed 1,817 cases of currently employed respondents from the 2005 Taiwan national survey on social capital. All the indicators on structural embeddedness are operationalized from position-generated networks, and we performed regression models for total, hi-tech, and non-hi-tech samples.Findings – Except the universal effects of diversity on innovation at work for employees in both hi-tech and non-hi-tech sectors, density and trust of accessed networks significantly affect innovation at work only for employees in non-hi-tech sectors. There is a slight interaction effect between trust and density on innovation at workplaces. Those individuals with high-degree trust in accessed networks tend to have a lower degree of innovation while their network density is high. It implies that complementary networks seem to be more useful for applying new ideas at the workplace for non-hi-tech workers.Originality/value of chapter – This chapter contributes to the literature by presenting the importance of structural embeddedness of accessed social networks for innovation at work.