Building a Dolmen: An ISD Approach to the Management of Innovation

Abstract

This chapter addresses a "challenge in practice" by describing the initial stage of an information systems development (ISD) project to support the management of innovation within a subsidiary of APC-MGE. To begin with, a review is presented of relevant literature on the management of innovation and on ISD. The background of the case study is outlined and the advantages of a dialogical action research approach to ISD are discussed. Then the development of a conceptual model using the organizational analysis approach of Multiview2 is described. The work proposes to make a contribution in a number of areas. Firstly, it provides empirical evidence of the role of innovation in an organizational transformation and the challenge of designing an information system to support this objective. Secondly, it presents an example of using dialogical action research, recently introduced to the MIS discipline by Martensson and Lee, to develop an information system. Future work will involve tracking the implementation of the concept in order to evaluate its impact on the organization.