The balance between bricolage and innovation: management dilemmas in sustainable public innovation

Abstract

Innovation is usually understood as a conscious development and implementation of new products or services. This article takes its starting point in a case study that shows how ‘innovation’ in reality happens as small step ‘bricolage’ – as a ‘do-it-yourself’ problem-solving activity taking place in daily work situations. Consequently, an experiment was carried out with the purpose of testing if, how and with what results the ‘bricolage’ can be better integrated with the organisation's more formal innovation procedures.