Micro-Processes of Collaborative Innovation in Danish Welfare Settings: A Psychosocial Approach to Learning and Performance

This chapter explores micro processes of collaborative innovation from a learning perspective. The point of departure for the chapter is my ongoing research with welfare service professionals who display considerable ambivalence towards innovation, feeling both enthusiastic towards it and burdened by it. I start by framing the Danish discourse of public collaborative governance in two empirical fields: sitebased management and democracy in the 1990s, and social entrepreneurship and social innovation in the 2000s. I demonstrate how the prevailing discourses offer a number of scripts for action, performance and learning, which can produce important results. However, by analysing learning in collaborative innovation processes from a psychosocial perspective I also demonstrate how identification, ambivalence, idealisation and defence are significant features of the professionals’ learning and performance and consequently how contemporary collaborative innovation can lead both to constructive and destructive processes.