Tuomo Alasoini

Strategies to Promote Workplace Innovation: A Comparative Analysis of Nine National and Regional Approaches

This article provides an analysis of strategies aimed to promote workplace innovation in nine national and regional policy contexts in the last few years. Its conceptual objective is to elaborate a model, developed by Naschold, and assess its usability in the analysis of contemporary workplace development strategies. The empirical objective of this article is to assess strengths and weaknesses of the strategies and similarities and differences between them by means of the model. The comparison results in a map of profiles of the nine strategies. The policy objective of this article is to raise issues that can be considered crucial for promoting learning across national borders in workplace development. The study was implemented between 2005 and 2008 as part of the EU-funded WORK-IN-NET project (2004—9).

In Search of Generative Results: A New Generation of Programmes to Develop Work Organization

This article examines means to improve the ability of work organization development programmes to create and disseminate good practices. The article states that there is a growing need for strategies that understand good practices more as generative ideas than ‘ready-made’ objects, and in which the focus of attention is on the creation of interactive contexts between various players already at the project planning and implementation stage. The ‘modules’ of the Norwegian Enterprise Development 2000 Programme (1994–2001) and the ‘network projects’ and ‘learning networks’ of the Finnish Workplace Development Programme (1996–2009) are used as examples of the principles of the new strategy in practice.