Blessings and Pitfalls of Harnessing Employee-Driven Innovation within a Work Model

The rising digitization changes the development processes of innovation in organizations. This provides employees the opportunity to take part in it. Even though their participation offers favorable opportunities, employees’ role as potential innovators has been mainly left unattended both in research and practice. By following examples such as Google’s “Innovation Time Off” and releasing employees temporarily from their regular work to develop new ideas, organizations’ can take a step in this direction. However, due to the existence of only few practical cases, limited knowledge exists on work models’ successful implementation for employee-driven innovation in general, and its drivers and barriers in particular. Thus, we have conducted a case study with an IT service provider implementing such a work model. Using the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework as guiding lens, our results show that work models’ effectiveness increases with the presence of ‘innovation champions’ and that work models produce additional positive work-related outcomes.