How Autoethnography Enables Sensemaking across Organizations

Abstract

Building on participatory innovation, and taking a personal and analytical autoethnographic approach we set out to investigate how innovative initiatives emerge in the interaction of multiple stakeholders across different organizations. As researchers, we are interested in understanding the lived experience of the lead author, as an inquiry into how new initiatives across organizations are shaped in the interaction between different stakeholders across field sites and organizational levels. The project evolved as a cross‐institutional initiative; bridging health‐care and engineering education, and while the lead author was initially involved as design consultant, his engagement later resulted in the initiation of cross‐disciplinary collaboration between two different local institutions. This paper is thus an attempt to investigate how emerging organizational initiatives and multi‐stakeholder innovation become enabling to recognize and act upon emerging opportunities; through active personal involvement and by the use of an autoethnographic research approach.The aim of the paper is to address the following research questions: How does the involvement of multiple stakeholders across different field sites and levels enable or constrain the emergence of innovation?And how can autoethnography, as a method, enable us to navigate within the sensemaking process in the field of participatory innovation? The contribution of the paper is grounded in the analysis of real encounters across multiple field sites, and provides insight into how the themes of trust and power are crucial in understanding how new meaning evolves as a result of local interactions and on‐going negotiations between multiple stakeholders.Our goal is to discuss how innovation can be understood, not only as a process leading to a tangible and commercial outcome, but as a dialogical process of relationships, emerging in the interactions of different stakeholders. With autoethnography we have achieved a deeper level of insight into such process, which challenges traditional notions of innovation and ethnography.