A web-based platform is a good servant but a bad master in employee driven development

​A joint project of the universities of Turku and Jyväskylä called Entrepreneurial renewal and design thinking in organisational development has been testing a web-based co-creation tool – Idea Window – in both health care organisations and in primary and secondary schools during this year.

The Idea Window was used at Tampere University Hospital’s pregnancy, childbirth and neonatal ward and in the emergency department as part of their wider service design projects. In the social and health care sector the Idea Window was also used to collect good practices and to develop the network of nurses working with patients with a memory disease. A new unit for the care of elderly people will be established in Saarijärvi, where employees-to-be have been invited to co-create values and new working practices for their workplace. This has been achieved by combining the use of Idea Window with workshop activities. In a school environment, Idea Window has been used in the primary and secondary schools of Äänekoski municipality. There, teachers, pupils and parents tested Idea Window by brainstorming new ways to activate pupils during school day and to develop relevant topics for the local curriculum.

Idea Window is good but not sufficient

The web-based co-creation tool proved to be powerful for gathering ideas. One of its strengths was to create a more inclusive and open platform for ideas that is also open to more introverted participants. However, we noticed that further development of ideas in the Idea Window was not as active as expected. To date, the best results have been obtained from experiments where the Idea Window was used as part of a larger development project and in parallel with other working methods. Workers taking responsibility for the development of their own work is closely linked to the management of organisational renewal. One of our findings was that a person is needed to manage the development process in its entirety, and who can determine that the changes suggested are in line with organisation strategy. This is because many of the ideas entered into the Idea Window are often close to the everyday work of employees and can be quite mundane and fragmented. Finally, based on what we have learned, technical improvements have been made to the Idea Window programme to improve its usability.

More information on DESI2 project:
Project researcher Satu Aaltonen: satu.aaltonen(a)utu.fi; tel. +358 2 333 9512