Designing and Enabling Spaces for collaborative knowledge creation and innovation: From managing to enabling innovation as socio-epistemological technology

Abstract

This paper is about designing spaces enabling processes of collaborative knowledge creation and innovation. It is a theoretical paper on the role of artifacts as enablers for creating new knowledge. We refer to these artifacts as Enabling Spaces comprising an architectural, technological (ICT), social, cognitive, organizational, cultural, as well as emotional dimension.The claim of this paper is that innovation is a highly challenging social and epistemological process which needs supporting (infra-)structures facilitating and enabling these processes. These processes have to take into account on various levels and domains in an integrated and interdisciplinary manner. It will be shown that innovation can no longer be understood as a mechanistic knowledge creation process. The concept of enabling will be developed as an alternative approach to innovation and will be applied as a design principle for Enabling Spaces. We will discuss the role of ICT in such an alternative approach to innovation. Finally, we will derive design principles for such highly interdisciplinary Enabling Spaces from these considerations.