The 3rd Participatory Innovation Conference, PIN-C will be held in Lahti, Finland on 18-20 June 2013. Organised jointly by Lappeenranta University of Technology, Lahti School of Innovation (LUT LSI) and University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg Participatory Innovation Research Centre (SPIRE), this conference will bring together researchers, artists, designers and practitioners.
The 3rd Participatory Innovation Conference, PIN-C will be held in Lahti, Finland on 18-20 June 2013. Organised jointly by Lappeenranta University of Technology, Lahti School of Innovation (LUT LSI) and University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg Participatory Innovation Research Centre (SPIRE), this conference will bring together researchers, artists, designers and practitioners.
The 3-day programme will include presentations by leading keynote speakers, research paper sessions, applied theatre, a hands-on innovation session with industry cases, and artistic interpretations of research. Participatory Innovation combines theories and methods across academic fields that describe how people outside an organisation can contribute to its innovation. Join this conference to help identify ways for industry, the public sector, and communities to expand innovation through the participation of
users, employees, suppliers, citizens, members, etc. – on a strategic level, in concrete methods, and in day-to-day interactions.
Industry, public agencies, and communities increasingly adopt people-driven and open innovation, as they realise that innovation cannot come solely from within an organisation. Innovation happens in between people outside and people inside – because they have different stakes and perspectives.
In academia, new breakthrough contributions to understanding and supporting innovation also emerge in the borderlands between disciplines that traditionally do not collaborate. PIN-C 2013 is a forum where participants from different disciplines and organisations can meet and challenge each other to develop the field of participatory innovation.
The conference theme for this year is Participation as Performance. In particular we welcome contributions that in concrete terms explore how performance can support innovation, or that draw on performance theory and methods to understand participation and innovation.
Keynote speakers include, inter alia:
Paper tracks
The trademark of this conference is that participants contribute with papers in one of five tracks that each explore a potential combination of disciplines. This year you can submit to any of these five exciting paper tracks:
1. Designed Interactions
Chairs: Trine Heinemann, SPIRE/University of Helsinki and Stephan Wensveen, SPIRE
A great challenge for designers and designers-to-be is how to deliver and present their design proposals. This is particularly the case for designers working within Participatory Innovation projects, where a range of issues for the design proposal need to be considered in relation to the other stakeholders, e.g., can a design proposal speak for itself so that it can be evaluated purely on its aesthetic and functional qualities, or should it be delivered along with a design pitch that reveals the underlying reasoning for the final product? The decisions on how to present a design proposal might depend on a variety of issues, such as time-limitations, the relationships and expectations of the client, or the position of the designers themselves. This track focuses on the various ways in which design proposals (the presentation of a preliminary or final design to stakeholders) can be delivered and on the consequences of these differences. The track brings together designers for whom design proposals are part of everyday practice, and experts on interaction and communication to explore how the delivery of a design proposal can be consequential for the way in which stakeholders in the design process respond to the design proposal.
2. Design Anthropology and Social Innovation
Chairs: Helinä Melkas, LUT LSI and Brendon Clark, Interactive Institute
This track brings together design anthropologists and business researchers and practitioners who focus on social innovation. Combining design and anthropology has over the years led to innovations in how ‘the social’ is addressed in design processes. There is currently much debate about what social innovation is and how it should be defined. Even though the concept is widely used, its contents have remained abstract. Both words – ’social’ and ’innovation’ allow for many interpretations. Social innovations have been defined, for instance, as innovations that are social both in their ends and in their means. How does social innovation play out in different efforts? How does working relationally with other interests in practice contrast with efforts that attempt to maintain a social innovation focus throughout? What are the practices of inclusion and exclusion? This track seeks participants who explore how design anthropology and social innovation are linked; how design anthropology contributes to social innovation and vice versa. This track also seeks to understand social enterprises, in particular.
3. Social Shaping of Innovation in Organisations
Chairs: Timo Pihkala, LUT LSI and Henry Larsen, SPIRE
This track brings together firm-level innovation management with organisational change. If we understand processes of innovation as emerging in human interaction, how can we understand the processes of collaboration and conflict that are going on between the involved? Who are the stakeholders involved in innovation processes, and which roles do they end up in? How can we understand what it means to ’organise’ such activities, as managers, designers, consultants or researchers? We invite both researchers andpractitioners to participate in this track with their experience, in the form of papers or narratives.
4. Participatory Business Design
Chairs: Tuomo Uotila, LUT LSI, and Jacob Buur, SPIRE
Bringing people with different backgrounds together is a powerful way of discovering new business opportunities. But how can people with different stakes, different horizons of imagination, and different means of expressing their views collaborate? How can theatre, games and arts-based methods contribute to developing business and business processes? How can futures research and foresight activities contribute? How does the role of brokering support participation? This track focuses on how to encourage truly participatory processes of business design, and on which results this can yield. The track
brings together business people (who innovate business models), designers and artists (who visualise futures to spur dialogue), and design and business researchers (who study and develop such processes).
5. (Regional) Innovation Policy and Local Participation
Chairs: Vesa Harmaakorpi, LUT LSI, and Henrik Sproedt, SPIRE
Today, when people talk about innovation systems they typically mean organisational, regional or national approaches to innovation that try to map and organise the different stakeholders, competences and procedures that are relevant for the innovation process. These approaches are normally described in an innovation policy – an institutionalised way of mastering innovation across boundaries efficiently. Despite extensive studies of innovation at individual, group and institutional levels there has not been much focus on the interdependence between these levels. Innovation can be seen as a process where
perspectives given at the institutional level need to be interpreted at the individual level, to understand how to deal with uncertainty in innovation projects. In practice, innovators often must deal with the paradox that innovation policy does not make sense in local interaction across boundaries. We invite researchers and practitioners of private and public organisations to this track to share their understandings of how innovation policies help to innovate and how local practice can affect policy.
More detailed track descriptions will be published in early November.
Programme on applied theatre in innovation
Chairs: Anne Pässilä, LUT LSI, Preben Friis, Dacapo A/S & Allan Owens, University of Chester
In accordance with the conference theme, we encourage applied theatre actors and artists with experience and interest in innovation and organisational change to submit an Intent to Participate. This group of active theatre people will in turn visit each paper track, and in this way explore the opportunities for theatre to support social shaping, business design, organisational learning, innovation policy making, etc. Participants who like to join this programme are encouraged to also join the preconference workshop on 16-17 June 2013.
Pre-conference workshop on applied theatre in innovation on 16-17 June 2013
For artists, actors, small theatre ensembles and researchers who have worked with theatre and related art forms in supporting innovation and change processes in organisations. The aim of the workshop is to exchange experience on various formats of theatre support for change processes, and to prepare the theatre programme at the conference. The group will explore what emerges when applied theatre and innovation research are combined.
Innovation session
New to the conference programme is also a hands-on innovation session, in which mixed teams across the five paper tracks get the chance to explore concrete industry/ organisational cases with the full breadth of Participatory Innovation perspectives.
Artistic interpretation of research
Art and research aim at defining reality and experience, both with their own means. The aim of this activity of the conference is to link researchers, artists and creative practitioners into a dialogue around scientific papers and create a discourse that very seldomly occurs between art and research on a practical level. The result of this dialogue would be artworks from any field of art or design (poster, painting, performance, design, etc.) merging practitioner’s expertise with scientific content.
Important dates
PIN-C follows a two-step peer-review process: both abstracts and full manuscripts are peer-reviewed.
Accepted papers will be presented in the conference programme and published in the conference proceedings. Further information soon on the conference website.
Conference chairs: professor Helinä Melkas, LUT LSI, and professor Jacob Buur, SPIRE