Getting the Measure of Employee‐Driven Innovation and Its Workplace Correlates
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12528 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Alan Felstead,Duncan Gallie,Francis Green,Golo Henseke |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12528
58:4 December 2020 0007–1080 pp. 904–935
Getting the Measure of
Employee-Driven Innovation
and Its Workplace Correlates
Alan Felstead , Duncan Gallie ,
Francis Green and Golo Henseke
Abstract
Innovation is traditionally viewed as an activity which involves a small band of
highly skilled workers. By examining the results of a British surveyof employees,
this article breaks with this approach. It makes two distinctive contributions.
First, it provides new insights into the extent to which employees of all kinds
come up with ideas about improving the work processes they use, the products
they make and services they provide. Secondly, it examines the correlates of
this behaviour. The results show that the strength of employee involvement, the
nature of workplace support and development and performance management
are strongly associated with employees’ willingness and ability to come up with
innovativeideas. However,some of these features of workhave declined in Britain
in recent years, while economic outcomes often associated with innovation —
such as increased productivity and stronger economic growth — have stalled.
1. Introduction
This article presents and analyses new data on employee-driven innovation
in Britain, and is motivated by the increased recognition of the role played
by innovation in solving a number of economic challenges, such as slowing
productivity and weakening economic growth. The G20’s Innovation Action
Plan, for example, stated that ‘innovation is one of the key driving forces .. . in
promoting economic growth, supporting job creation, entrepreneurship and
structural reform, [and] enhancing productivity and competitiveness’ (G20
2016: 2). In a similar vein, the European Commission (EU) launched its
Innovation Union strategy in 2010 with the aim of promoting ‘change that
Alan Felstead is atthe School of Social Sciences, Cardi University. Duncan Gallie is at Nueld
College, Oxford. Francis Green is at UCL Institute of Education. Golo Henseke is at UCL
Institute of Education.
C
2020 The Authors.British Journal of Industrial Relations published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits
use, distributionand reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.
Employee-Driven Innovation 905
speeds up and improvesthe way we conceive, develop,produce and access new
products, industrial processes and services’ (European Commission 2010: 1;
European Commission 2015).
Traditional approaches to collecting and analysing innovation data
have focused on research and development (R&D) expenditure, patent
applications, the share of the population with graduate qualifications and
major breakthroughs in product development or service delivery. Such
quantitative data are usually collected at the level of the firm and/or nation
state,and are presented in terms of international league tables (Dodgson 2017;
Edler and Fagerberg 2017). This is known as the ‘Science, Technology and
Innovation’ (STI) approach (Smith 2006).
Another approach is to take a bottom-up perspective which focuses on
innovations which arise through the act of ‘Doing, Using and Interacting’
(DUI) at work (e.g. De Spiegalaere et al. 2014; Jensen et al. 2007). This
approach defines innovation as ‘the generation of new ideas, products or
processes — including the everyday remaking of jobs and organizational
practices — originating from the interaction of employees, who are not
assigned to this task’ (Nøyrup 2012: 8). By carrying out their daily work tasks,
employees throughout the organization may come up with ideas about how
they (and others) might work more eciently and/or improve the product
produced and/or services oered. This may, in turn, generate additional value
for the business in line with the Schumpeterian notion of innovation as
‘novelty that creates economic value’ (Schumpeter, 1934, quoted in Nøyrup
2012). Typically, this approach is based on case studies and small-scale survey
evidence (e.g. Billett 2012; De Jongand Den Hartog 2010; Halford et al. 2019:
Tabl e 1).
By presenting and analysing new representative data on the ways and extent
to which employees claim to improve work processes, products or services,
this article contributes to the development and analysis of DUI-inspired
quantitative measures of innovation. The article is structured as follows.
Section 2 outlines the measurement approaches which have shaped how the
survey data on employee-driveninnovation used in this article were collected.
The section also outlines what role workplace factors — such as individual
and collective voice, the nature of support and development and the use
of performance management — might have on employee-driven innovation.
The article tests the strength of these associations using data taken from the
Skills and Employment Survey 2017 (SES2017), a nationally representative
sample survey of working adults aged 20–65 years old in Britain. Section 3
outlines this data source in a little more detail, describes how the data on
employee-driven innovation were collected and subsequently validated and
provides an account of how the suggested correlates of employee-driven
innovationare operationalized. Section 4 presents a descriptive account of the
data, the results of multivariate analyses which aim to identify the strength
and importance of the suggested correlates and an analysis of how these
correlates have changed over the last decade. The results show that employee-
driven innovation is higher where employees are more involved in decisions
C
2020 The Authors.British Journal of Industrial Relations published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
906 British Journal of Industrial Relations
TABL E 1
Dimensions of Employee-Driven Innovation
(a) Generation of innovativeideas
Importance of:
Keeping up-to-date
and applying new
knowledge
(column %)
Developing new or
improved work
processes, products
or services
(column %)
Developing plans
to put new ideas
into practice
(column %)
Importance rating (1) (2) (3)
Not at all important (0) 2.5 5.7 7.2
Not very important (1) 5.4 7.5 10.0
Fairly important (2) 11.8 17.3 19.8
Very important (3) 33.2 39.7 39.1
Essential (4) 47.2 29.8 24.0
Number of observations 2,876 2,870 2,875
(b) Action to innovate
Suggestions made about
ways of improvingthe
eciency of work
(column %)
Individual or group initiative to
make improvementsto work
processes, productsor services
(column %)
Frequency overlast year (1) (2)
Not once (0) 28.5 18.5
Once (1) 13.2 10.3
More than once (2) 58.3 71.2
Number of observations 2,855 1,699
(c) Employees’ self-assessment of innovativecontribution
Impact of:
Suggestions made
about ways of
improving the
eciency of work
(column %)
Problem-solving group
contributions to
improving work
processes, products
or services
(column %)
Consultation meeting
contributions to
improving workprocesses,
products or services
(column %)
Employee assessment (1) (2) (3)
Not relevant/made no
impact at all (0)
32.2 62.3 43.4
Not much (1) 14.5 3.2 12.1
A fair amount (2) 40.4 18.5 31.2
A great deal (3) 12.9 16.0 13.3
Number of observations 2,838 1,700 1,706
Source: Skills and Employment Survey2017 for this table and all others unless specified.
at work; are provided with training, learning and line management support
which promotes their willingness and ability to innovate; and are rewarded
and assessed according to their performance. Taken together, these three
sets of correlates account for almost half of the variation in employee-
driven innovation.However, despite the importance of innovation to business
performance, some of these correlates have gone into reverse. Between 2006
C
2020 The Authors.British Journal of Industrial Relations published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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