Organizing Practices in Services: Capturing Practice-Based Knowledge for Innovation

Service innovation depends on ambiguous designing and using knowledge. But this knowledge is embedded in ongoing practice, so capturing it requires the practices themselves to be organized somehow. I integrate literatures on work as practice with strategic innovation management to develop empirically grounded theory for this problem.The analysis identifies three work activities through which knowledge for innovation is generated, shows how they constitute a common ground for knowledge creation and redefines practice as a coherent frame for these activities. The analysis explains how conventional organizing destroys this knowledge, and develops organizing principles for the continued generation, capture and use of practice-based knowledge for innovation.The principles are strategically articulating the firm’s practices as actual problems of value creation; embedding the three activities into everyone’s jobs; and transforming R&D into a formal process for reflecting on practice.