ISBN: 978-3-89518-822-0

Kessels, J.W.M. Verdonschot, S. De Jong, T. (2011) Characteristics of learning environments which support knowledge productivity and which facilitate innovation. In IPOB (ed.) The future of knowledge intensive service work. pp 221-232. Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag.

The ability to gather information, generate new knowledge, disseminate and apply this knowledge to achieve improvements and innovations is an organisation’s knowledge productivity (Kessels, 2004). Knowledge productivity is increasingly regarded as the dominant economic factor in a knowledge society and stresses the importance of a conducive learning environment that facilitates innovation. This paper summarizes two recent studies in the domain of knowledge productivity and innovation trying to answer the following research questions:

1. If innovation can be regarded as the outcome of a learning process in a social network, what are the main characteristics of the supportive learning environments?
2. What are relevant design principles for developing a supportive learning environment for innovation?

The provisional answers to these questions follow from the outcomes of the studies by De Jong, Verdonschot & Kessels (2008), Verdonschot (2009) and De Jong (2010) that examined the innovation practices in 35 cases in the period of 2003-2009.

The text can be downloaded here.