Processes, practices and structures beneficial for fostering innovation within organizations

The work concerns how various individual motives affect creativity and implementation in the innovation process. Additionally, I seek to assess whether incentives such as monetary rewards, increased autonomy, praise, etc. can help or hinder motivation (pa rticularly intrinsic motivation) for innovation, and whether or not having meaning (e.g., benefiting society) in one's position can have a positive effect on innovation. I intend to study the links between motivation, incentives, meaning, and innovation t hrough a multidisciplinary perspective that utilizes interviews, surveys, and experiments.

As an industry funded PhD student with Yara International, I aspire to research innovation in business management and strategy. My research will view innovation from an organizations perspective with potential focus on the following topics: motivation and incentives for innovation, open innovation and its application and effects, cognition/learning processes within innovation, absorptive capacity of an organization for innovation, and the historical consequences of innovation culture. By building on the t heories of academicians such as E. A. Locke, W.M. Cohen, D. Levinthal, and H. Chesbrough, my research will contribute to a deeper understanding of organizational mechanisms and innovation processes. Research methods used will likely include quantitative a nd qualitative methods consisting of statistics, ethnographies, case and comparative studies, and simulations in order to form a comprehensive basis for innovation and its implications; this will combine to improve the field of organizational and innovati on research as a whole.