Creating Common Ground: Formalizing and Designing Employee-driven Innovation Processes with Decision Points.

Striving for innovation and advancement, a phenomenon can be observed wherein organizations are progressively incorporating their 'ordinary' employees into the innovation process, capitalizing on their creativity, expertise, and knowledge to foster novel ideas. Such integration mandates formalized yet flexible processes to offer a common ground for both employees as idea contributors and managers as decisionmakers, enabling control and governance. Despite this, a conspicuous knowledge gap exists within the realm of employee-driven innovation (EDI) concerning the design of EDI processes. In this paper, we present the outcomes of an action design research project conducted with a medium-sized organization, focusing on formalizing and designing an EDI process with decision points through three iterative cycles. This research contributes fourteen meta-requirements and eleven design principles for EDI process design, thereby expanding the theoretical (prescriptive) knowledge base. Additionally, the results offer practical implications, enabling organizations to adopt the EDI process accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]