Organising Innovation : An ANT Inquiry of VINNOVA, Sweden

Abstract: If one types on the Google search bar knowledge society or innovation about 64 million and 408 million results are found, respectively. It is fact, a product. It is there. However, once this taken for granted “knowledge society” is scrutinised, several different actors, conflicting or agreeing, emerge. What once taken as a product “out there”, a cause, is now a process, a society in the making and its effects. In this study I seek to open these black-boxes, the taken-for-granted domains by “following the actants”, and describing their actions in relation to other actants, in a specific place and specific time and showing the effects these create. The study draws on the sociology of translation and focuses on assembling, bundling, or knitting pieces together which in turn create effects of organising with organising shape, and fame that we are familiar with, specifically VINNOVA. The study seeks to describe how VINNOVA has been constructed as a leading authority in innovation systems for sustainable development, by specifically describing the mechanisms VINNOVA uses to join different actors to construct a Swedish innovation system and the effects created by this movement from small to a leading innovation authority. While I draw from previous research on innovation systems that look at organisations as finished entities, in this thesis I take a step forward by examining VINNOVA not as a complete or finite entity but rather as an ongoing process of organising that is by nature precarious. The study highlights that VINNOVA is a precarious heterogeneous network which embodies a neo-liberal, thus business-oriented perspective on sustainable development, and it is by understanding how entities like VINNOVA grow and manage to crystallise their performances, despite overt contestation that different potential, possible and existing performances can also be brought to visibility. The study also shows how centres and peripheries are effects of the endeavours of constructing a globally connected world.