From Knowledge Transfer to Situated Innovation Cultivating spaces for co-operation in innovation and design between academics, user-groups and ICT providers

Innovation systems, ‘triple helix’, and similar expressions, are used to conceptualise the growing need for more integrated forms of co-operation between academia and other societal actors, such as governmental agencies and industry, in order to produce knowledge relevant for society. However, there is as yet little reported experience from such recent and on-going co-operative projects of how research changes when it becomes involved in practices it is meant to contribute to. In this paper, the authors report about three different research projects where researchers co-operated with governmental agencies and industry around the development of ICT. Evidence from three domains, namely e-government, telecommunications and welfare services, indicates the need for problematising current mainstream understandings of innovation. Innovation, as we see it, is occurring through configurations of designers, developers and domain experts that form constituencies and where scientific knowledge is confronted by requirements, constraints and possibilities of the specific situation. In this context innovation of, or involving, ICT requires a significant amount of imagination, represents a relatively sharp break with established ways of doing things, and requires artful integration of different professional practices, communities, and technologies. We define these creative processes of co-development of work practices, organisations and technology as ‘situated innovation’