Conclusion: Potentials for a cross-disciplinary contribution

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Together, the critique from Weik (2011) regarding the ontological divide in organization process studies along with the critique from Steyaert (2012) pointing the tendency in organization process studies to sustain a representational mode of theorizing processes, form the point of departure for a potential contribution to organization process studies. Along with responding to the limitations in innovation systems theory, the purpose of the cartographic approach will be to suggest one possible way to make steps in the directions pointed to by Weik and Steyaert respectively.

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inquiry might be developed in-between established innovation and organization research. This is also in line with a plea from within innovation systems studies calling for more cross-disciplinary research linking innovation management and organization research (Nooteboom and Stam 2008).

Thus, the reviewed innovation systems literature persistently points to patterns of interaction as drivers of innovation processes. However, the methods and analytical frameworks used sustain a detached engagement with these processes. This implies that the methods dominating the field preconfigure innovation systems research to reproduce a practice of studying systemic innovation from afar. This is an unproductive limitation in that it prevents innovation systems research from obtaining more processual research methods, as I shall further elaborate in chapter 4. In combination with sweeping agency assumptions, the distanced research methods in innovation systems studies imply an inherent lack of capacity to studying systemic innovation in the making even though the relational dynamics and “systemic perspectives” on innovation since long has become a dominant view in this field (Kuhlmann, Shapira and Smits 2010, Martin 2012).

This calls for introducing new methods and analytical strategies which allows for a relational and processual inquiry of systemic innovation in the making – that is, how relational potential is created and turned into new, performative associations across e.g.

disciplinary and sectorial divides. Specifically, I pointed to the need for introducing

“baroque” systems theories since many of the limitations inherent to innovation systems research are linked, I argued, to the predominance of romantic holism as a foundational assumption regarding the nature of ‘innovation systems’ and their parts-to-whole organization. With the two legs of the cartographic approach, the aim is to

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develop and render plausible such an alternative strategy for studying systemic innovation in the making.

In the reading of organization process research, I pointed to how this stream within organization studies has opened up for foundational debates in organization studies with regard to the ontological and epistemological underpinnings and their corresponding implications for method, theory and research practice. Following Weik (2011), I pointed to how the process stream tends to sustain an ontological dichotomy between “being” and “becoming”, structure and process, which is an obstacle for this field to inquire and help explain the actualization of organization as structure and formatting of processes. The critique of structuralist thinking in organization change analysis has therefore lead to an ontological reversal which however calls for renewed critique in order to reach more integrative theories to understand how “being” and

“becoming” are inherent aspects of the same process, rather than two separate

“perspectives” we might choose between in our analytical work. With Steyaert (2011, 2012) I pointed also to the potential of further developing performative research methods as part of enriching the process stream in organization studies. This would offer an alternative to a representational mode of knowing processes which tends to prevail despite the processual turn and its embracing of the processual nature of all things and beings. This should, I would argue, be integrated in the understanding of knowledge and knowledge production in order to fully mature in the actual research practice of the field.

In combination, the readings of innovation and organization process studies reveal a potential for a cross-disciplinary contribution which on the one hand picks up the problem of understanding patterns of interaction in the making which remains to be a core problem in innovation systems research, while on the other hand mobilizing

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resources for studying such processes within the field of organization process studies, particularly the recent critical debates that opens up new developments in this field.

This, in turn, also opens up for a feedback loop from innovation studies towards organization process studies in the sense that in innovation research, we are confronted with a clear intellectual and practice challenge of analyzing the actualization of potentiality in a variety of contexts and problem-areas. To make a contribution to innovation studies implies therefore a strong attendance to processes (which the resources from organization process research helps me accomplish) but at the same time one commits also to respond to the question of how the new enters the actual – that is, how ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ are each other’s condition of possibility rather than each other’s opposition.

These are some of the potential contributions I find to be the outcome of problematizing innovation and organization studies. In the following chapters, I will develop the approach taken in this dissertation in response to these challenges. I will begin by introducing the empirical field of study and the SEEIT strategic partnership in particular. The purpose is to introduce at an empirical level what I suggest to call cartographic processes. These processes play an important role in organizing energy research towards open-ended system transition objectives and new organizational solutions are being developed to incorporate a capacity to coordinate cooperation strategically in order to solve a variety of relational problems inherent to energy system transitions. Strategic partnerships are examples of such organizational efforts.

After having introduced the empirical field, I will engage with the question of method.

Thus, in chapter 4 I respond to the question of how to study systemic innovation in the making. I will elaborate my research process and suggest a methodological framing using Law and Urry’s (2004) performativity of method argument along with Steyaert’s

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(2011 & 2012) arguments of doing process research through in(ter)vention and experimentation. The methodological chapter is the first leg of the cartographic approach which is suggested as an alternative way of studying systemic innovation in the making beyond traditional method conventions which prevail in innovation research as well as organization process studies, as pointed to in this chapter.

The second leg of the cartographic approach is the construction of the analytical strategy which I will embark on in chapter 5. The challenge here is to develop an analytical strategy which prepares for an analysis of SEEIT as a process of systemic innovation in the making – a process of cartographizing. I will predominantly draw upon key concepts and arguments from the work of Gregory Bateson and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari. The analytical strategy is constructed with an explicit aim of providing a ‘baroque’ alternative to the romantic holism which dominates the systems thinking in innovation studies as pointed to previously in this chapter. Thus, the analytical strategy of the cartographic approach seeks to prepare an analysis of tensions, and intensifications of interaction processes and the social productivity of heterogeneity and “charged mixtures” of fields of expertise and diverging strategic interests. We will therefore arrive at an analytical strategy which gives priority to rivalry, divergence, and creativity which are different manifestations of socially productive intensifications of the SEEIT partnership process.

Together, the two legs of the analytical strategy will open up for an alternative, complexity affirming approach to studying and analyzing systemic innovation in the making which I will use to develop three examples of cartographic intensifications and their social productivity in the case of SEEIT in chapter 6 and 7. After the analysis, I will return to the proposed, potential contributions developed in this chapter and I will elaborate on a number of implications for the practice of organizing processes of

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systemic innovation through strategic partnerships, as promised in the introduction chapter.

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