Towards a broad-based innovation policy in the UK: Can design help?

Introduction

It is widely acknowledged that innovation – the commercialisation of new technologies and ideas – is important for national competitiveness, productivity and growth (Kuhlmann and Edler, 2003). Universities are seen as having a central role, not only as a supplier of graduates but also as a source of scientific and technological innovations for industry. In the UK, this focus on ‘big science’ dominates innovation policy (DBIS, 2011). The recent Witty Report (2013) emphasises the contribution that universities can make to an advanced high-tech economy and the Coalition government’s industrial strategy sectors and technologies. These sectors include agro-tech, nuclear, life sciences and the information economy, while the technologies embrace the likes of ‘big data’, synthetic biology and regenerative medicine.

The problem, as Keep (2014) notes, is two-fold. First, high-tech sectors employ relatively few people and are hardly representative of the ‘real’ economy, from which innovation policy remains detached. Second, a science-centric approach risks neglecting other sources of innovation, not least the contribution employees might make through the application of their skills and learning at work. Research suggests the UK confronts a serious problem with the under-utilisation of skills, linked to how many firms compete, design jobs and manage staff (Keep, 2014). Furthermore, the UK government’s approach appears lop-sided compared with that favoured by the OECD (2010) and a number of European countries which embraces organisational as well as technological and scientific innovations (Ramstad, 2009). This broader view of innovation re-centres the workplace, the employer and employees alongside science and technology, and sees a role for public policy and action research in helping organisations to develop their internal ways of working so as to make better use of employees’ capabilities. With this in mind, some European countries have developed publicly funded ‘workplace innovation’ programmes, an area where the UK has been noticeably lacking (Keep, 2014).

The situation is somewhat different in Scotland, where economic development and education and skills policy are devolved to the Scottish government. Significantly, productivity has lagged behind England, despite Scotland having a more qualified workforce at degree and sub-degree level. Consequently, while ‘skills utilisation’ is a challenge which confronts the whole of the UK, it is in Scotland where the impact on policy has been most evident (Warhurst and Findlay, 2012). To address this challenge, ministerial working groups with broad stakeholder involvement have been established. In a novel experiment, a programme of 12 skills utilisation projects, with £2.9 million from the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) between 2009 and 2012, sought to test the role that universities and colleges might play in helping organisations make more effective use of skills (Payne, 2012). One project, Creating Cultures of Innovation (CCoI), run by the Glasgow School of Art, explored the role of design and ‘design thinking’.

‘Design thinking’ – how designers solve problems – has attracted interest among the business community and policy makers as a potential driver of innovation (Kimbell, 2011). While it might be tempting to dismiss this as another managerial ‘fad’ or policy ‘fix’, it would be wrong to do so out of hand. Besides, there is a historical precedent which suggests that design might potentially contribute to skills utilisation. The ‘participatory design’ movement, which emerged initially in Scandinavia in the 1970s, involved designers working with trade unions and employees to support skilled work threatened by computer technologies (Greenbaum and Kyng, 1991).

The article considers whether design today can contribute to workplace innovation through good skills utilisation, with the CCoI project used as an empirical vignette to highlight key challenges. Seeking to stimulate debate on innovation policy in the devolved UK, it addresses three audiences: policy makers open to exploring workplace innovation but who may need help to develop and evaluate policy interventions; critical researchers on work who have largely retreated into detached critique, eschewing practical action research to improve work and employee participation inside organisations; and designers who are exploring whether design might contribute.

The article begins by outlining the case for a broad-based innovation policy and discusses the central principles that have informed workplace innovation programmes in European countries which have led on this agenda. It then locates CCoI against the background of contemporary debates around design thinking, before touching upon the history of ‘traditional’ participatory design and what this has to say about the challenges designers are likely to confront when seeking to facilitate organisational innovation. Drawing upon interviews with the CCoI team and participants in one workplace project, the article explores key issues that are emerging. The article concludes with a discussion of whether design might contribute to a broader innovation policy which brings the workplace back in.

Towards a broad-based innovation policy

It has become commonplace within UK business and policy circles to emphasise the importance of engaged and creative employees in delivering competitive advantage (MacLeod and Clarke, 2009). There is a long line of managerialist literature from the Quality Movement in the 1980s to what is variously labelled ‘sophisticated HRM’, ‘high-commitment management’ and ‘high-performance working’. These concepts have overlapped with the seductive discourse of the ‘knowledge-based’ economy, and together have exerted a powerful appeal to policy makers. That appeal lay in the proposition that ‘old’ bureaucratic management and Taylorist work organisation were giving way to ‘flatter’ organisations in which workers could look forward to jobs with expansive opportunities for autonomy, learning and ‘authorship’ (Leadbetter, 1999).

Such depictions look badly overdrawn compared with the existing UK economy. While ‘knowledge work’ is real, it applies to only a minority of the workforce, and is mainly concentrated within particular sectors and among certain professional groups (Brinkley et al., 2009). The labour market is said to be polarising between high-skill, high-wage ‘good’ jobs and low-skill, low-paid ‘lousy’ jobs (Goos and Manning, 2007). Studies indicate the UK confronts serious challenges in terms of the volume of low-wage work, estimated to be around a fifth of the workforce, and the under-utilisation of skills (Brinkley et al., 2009; Keep, 2014). It recently trailed in at second to bottom of 22 OECD countries for the proportion of the workforce who are ‘over-qualified’ for their jobs, estimated at 30% (OECD, 2013: 171). Domestic surveys suggest a figure of just above 36%, having dipped slightly since 2006 (Felstead et al., 2013). European survey data point to the limited diffusion of forms of work organisation characterised by high levels of discretion and learning intensity compared with Scandinavia, along with proportionally more ‘Taylorist’ and ‘simple’ jobs (Holm et al., 2010).

It has often been argued that the UK’s neoliberal model, with its focus on short-term ‘shareholder value’, weakened trade unions and a lightly regulated labour market, inclines many organisations to compete through cost-minimisation, ‘neo-Taylorist’ work design and ‘hire-and-fire’ flexibility. Where organisations compete profitably on this ‘low road’, improvement in the supply of skills, on its own, is unlikely to bring about changes in their competitive strategy, work design or people management (Keep, 2014; Warhurst and Findlay, 2012).

Insofar as UK policy makers have had a policy for addressing the latter, it has been to try and persuade organisations to embrace ‘high-performance working’ (HPW), understood to involve the ‘bundling’ of various managerial and work practices that are thought to benefit both organisations and employees. Here, high performance is said to accrue from workers giving ‘discretionary effort’ in jobs which provide them with the ability, motivation and opportunity to develop and deploy their skills and learning. Employee involvement, training, team working, the opportunity to contribute ideas and make decisions over how work is carried out figure prominently in these discussions. Consequently, HPW has been embraced by policy makers as a vehicle for good skills utilisation (UKCES, 2009a, 2009b).

This is not unproblematic. There are intense debates around whether HPW delivers higher performance or benefits employees, which are further compounded by definitional ambiguity (Lloyd and Payne, 2006; Warhurst and Findlay, 2012). There is little consensus as to the ‘bundle’ of practices comprising an HPW strategy. Many of the more typical practices are subject to widely varying interpretation; team working may involve autonomous teams or more ‘Taylorised’ forms, while ‘employee involvement’ spans high-level consultation forums, problem-solving groups, suggestion schemes and so on.

Earlier debates on worker participation saw this readily dismissed by some critics as a ‘honeyed flypaper dangled out to capture the unwitting worker’ and deflect them from struggles for workers’ control (Ramsay, 1993: 79). However, managerial motives for seeking workers’ involvement are varied, reflecting a range of factors and different routes to competitive advantage. While ‘employee involvement’ can be used by employers to legitimise changes that increase exploitation through deskilling and work intensification, there may also be cases where employees gain meaningful ‘degrees of autonomy and creativity’ (Harley et al., 2005: 14–15).

When it comes to HPW, commentators have had little difficulty unveiling examples that damage the quality of working life (Danford et al., 2008). Even policy bodies acknowledge some versions involve ‘increased workload, limited discretion and enhanced stress at work’ (UKCES, 2009a: 126). Some purported trends in contemporary capitalism hardly give cause for optimism. Thompson (2013: 473, 479) contends that the ‘financialisation’ of economies means intensifying pressures from shareholders and private equity firms which involve the ‘squeezing of labour … [through] delayering, disaggregation, downsizing and divestment’, with ‘ “high performance” work … largely an outcome of performance management and market discipline’, and the idea of employees ‘self-policing’ hardly credible. In the public sector, ‘lean working’ has been found to have similar effects in some contexts (Carter et al., 2011), and looks set to worsen in a period of austerity. As Thompson (2013: 481, 483) acknowledges, however, capital market pressures vary across national contexts, ‘the state and national labour market institutions are still mediators of change’, and much of the evidence comes from the US and UK. Even in neoliberal economies, the devil is in the detail as firms are shaped but not determined by institutional context.

As far as successive UK governments have been concerned, spreading HPW through exhortation and publicising exemplary cases is about as far as policy on skills utilisation and workplace innovation goes. If take-up is a measure of success, then policy confronts a major problem. Despite three decades during which sophisticated HRM and HPW have been widely promulgated among the business community, there is little evidence either have been adopted by more than a minority of organisations – if anything, this appears to have plateaued in recent years (UKCES, 2009b; Van Woonray et al., 2013).

Moreover, if there is one lesson to emerge from the burgeoning literature on HPW, it is the importance of context and implementation. The way change is handled, whether it is imposed or opened up to discussion and workers’ influence, is, as Edwards and Sengupta (2010: 394) note, ‘the apparently simple lesson, which has profound consequences if it is adopted’. Even if HPW is to be part of the solution to poor skill utilisation, this suggests a role for interventions inside the firm to help them deal with development challenges in situ. Such an understanding is profoundly unsettling for many policy makers, reluctant to be seen to interfere with managerial prerogative. It also raises the question as to what such interventions might look like, and who would facilitate them.

Workplace innovation

A starting point would be to re-think innovation policy so that it moves beyond a narrow focus on science and technology and recognises the improvements to products, services and processes which can derive from employees’ knowledge of their work, everyday problem solving and informal learning (Jensen et al., 2007). The ways work is designed and people are managed are key as they shape the degree of autonomy in the job and scope for continuous learning, both of which are likely to be strongly linked to skills utilisation (Keep, 2014; Payne, 2013). The literature on ‘employee-driven innovation’ draws attention to how improvements can be initiated by employees (Høyrup et al., 2012), but it is also open to facilitation by management. ¹ This type of innovation is vitally important as research suggests most innovation derives not from outside-in scientific or technological breakthroughs but from bottom-up, incremental improvements inside the workplace (Nielsen et al., 2012; Toner, 2011). As the OECD (2010: 10) notes, in nations ‘where work is organised to support high levels of employee discretion in solving complex problems, the evidence shows that firms tend to be more active in terms of innovations developed through their own in-house creative efforts’.

Workplace innovations can be defined as ‘strategically induced and participatory adopted changes in an organisation’s practice of managing, organising and deploying human and non-human resources that lead to simultaneously improved organisational performance and improved quality of working life’ (Pot et al., 2012: 262). A number of European countries have broadened innovation policy to reflect this understanding, with publicly funded workplace development programmes that offer organisations expert help, usually in the form of action researchers, to develop their internal operations (Totterdill et al., 2009). The Scandinavian countries have been to the fore, with Norway having a 40-year history of such programmes and Finland entering the field in the mid-1990s (Alasoini, 2006; Gustavsen, 2007). A central feature has been the active involvement of the state and labour market parties.

These initiatives stretch back to Norway’s Industrial Democracy Programme in the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to humanise work through various ‘field experiments’ with autonomous work groups, based on the ‘socio-technical approach’ inspired by the UK’s Tavistock Institute (Emery and Thorsrud, 1976). In the UK, as Huzzard and Bjørkman (2012) note, job redesign initiatives at this time drew criticism from radical commentators for failing to shift power asymmetries in the workplace or breach managerial prerogative, while diverting attention from fundamental sources of capitalist exploitation and inequality. In Scandinavia, however, these programmes were rooted in national agreements, and came to be surrounded by an extensive macro-institutional framework of multi-level collective bargaining, co-determination rights, labour market regulation and generous welfare provision.

Over time, there has been a shift away from an approach derived from a ‘general theory’ of job redesign, centred on autonomous teams, and relying on ‘star cases’ to convince other organisations to follow suit. Accepting there is no ‘best way’ to promote autonomy at work, the focus is on starting from specific organisational challenges, and sharing experiences among firms and regional actors through ‘development coalitions’ and ‘learning networks’ (Alasoini, 2006; Gustavsen, 2007).

Bringing together management and workers to discuss workplace challenges forms the core of developmental action research in an approach which emphasises ‘democratic dialogue’ (Gustavsen, 1992), ‘multi-voicedness’ and ‘broad-based participation’ (Alasoini, 2011: 34). Conflict and disagreement need to be acknowledged, assumptions challenged and all voices afforded legitimacy, such that the ‘process’ of change and dialogue – the way in which problems are defined and worked on – becomes as critical as the content itself (Totterdill et al., 2009: 36). The ‘democratic dialogue’ approach draws on Habermasian notions of rational communication, where respect for the other’s viewpoint is the precondition for mutual learning, and decisions are reached on the strength of the arguments. Unlike consultancy, this approach requires an openness to explore a problem that is not predefined and the solution to which cannot be predetermined (Totterdill et al., 2009).

Developmental work research is part of a broader action research tradition, which challenges the dominant idea of social science research as an objective, value-neutral activity, and emphasises participation with members of an organisation or community in the co-creation of practical, useful knowledge for human ‘emancipation’ and ‘flourishing’ (Reason and Bradbury, 2008). The approach raises numerous questions and confronts methodological challenges. What constitutes ‘emancipation’? How are researchers to deal with power imbalances (Johansson and Lindhult, 2008)? Should the focus be on nurturing the critical consciousness of the weak and marginalised to resist domination (Freire, 1970), or on working pragmatically for progressive change, including with those in power, at the risk of being co-opted by dominant interests? If power and inequality mean that claims of detached objectivity are to be regarded suspiciously, can action researchers retain sufficient distance from ‘participants’ to produce good evidence-based research as well as evaluate their own practice (Huzzard and Bjørkman, 2012)?

Writing from an educationalist perspective, McNiff (2002: 9, 146) argues that while researchers are ‘forever caught in politically constructed situations’, the inability to reach consensus on goals means they should strive to support ‘Good social orders … in which all people may make their contribution and have it valued’. For her, action research is always about learning and is premised upon the belief that people can work through their disagreements provided there is mutual respect for the other’s viewpoint. For an educationalist such as Brookfield (2014), inspired by the ‘critical theory’ of Adorno, Marcuse and others, voices which question organisational logics get marginalised or shut down as management uses invitations to ‘open’ dialogue as another way of legitimising decisions made elsewhere, beneath a facade of tolerance for all viewpoints. The question becomes whether there is space for a critical learning and development practice that can expose the way power operates in capitalist workplaces and, in doing so, advance more equitable and democratic working practices, without becoming another tool of management.

As Huzzard and Bjørkman (2012) note, similar questions apply to workplace development programmes – should ‘critical’ researchers have any truck with an intervention that has organisational performance on the agenda? This question has caused much soul searching within critical management studies, where an ‘anti-performativity stance’ has been accused of privileging detached critique over any attempt to engage with those who are the subject of criticism. Those seeking a more applied research agenda have tended to focus on management as a problematic practice, asking whether some managers might be ‘nudged’ towards a reflexive consciousness that opens up possibilities for more progressive organisational approaches, what have been dubbed ‘micro-emancipation’ or ‘small wins’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2015).

Writing from a labour process perspective, Thompson (2005: 60) rightly insists that ‘Productivity matters to employees as well as managers’, but that the material reality of their divergent interests must be firmly acknowledged, something he argues many within CMS struggle with. The essential point is that, ‘There is nothing in a labour process or other radical framework that a priori prevents recognition of mutual gains’ (Harley et al., 2005: 15). As Edwards (2003: 17, 13) notes, workers have ‘several interests’, the establishment of which is ‘never easy’. These can, however, encompass routes to efficiency that allow for meaningful participation and opportunities for the development and deployment of skills.

The question may not be so much whether ‘democratic dialogue’ is a utopian ideal in workplaces infused with hierarchical power, but under what conditions critical researchers can engage with organisations and, by bringing together different viewpoints, help managers and employees work through their problems in order to explore better ways of organising and working. The litmus test would be whether management is open to such an approach and workers’ interests are served in terms of genuine voice and participation in the development process and through enhanced autonomy and better jobs as an expanded outcome. Beirne (2008: 687, 690) argues that action research can potentially support ‘the “working out” of participation schemes’ by engaging with workers and ‘supportive managers’ to ‘stretch the collective sense of what is possible’. This is always a ‘problematic endeavour’ (2008: 691), but there are possibilities, notwithstanding constraints at the level of political economy and the danger of researchers becoming compromised within a managerialist agenda that might seek to strengthen labour control.

In terms of facilitating conditions, macro-level institutions clearly matter. Gallie (2007: 100) argues that the societal power of organised labour to constrain employers through the macro-institutional framework is central to understanding why the Nordic countries have gone furthest in developing forms of work organisation characterised by higher levels of autonomy and learning intensity (Holm et al., 2010). This environment may help to foreclose low-cost competitive strategies and push firms to seek cooperation with the workforce and their representatives around improving productivity through more skilled and autonomous job design. Research suggests co-determination arrangements, underpinned by strong but cooperative trade unions, can also help support workplace innovation (Nielsen et al., 2012) – indeed, the more complex and contested changes to working practices are, the more important representative participation becomes (Alasoini, 2011: 35). Nevertheless, some firms may still require programmatic forms of assistance to explore better ways of working. Although it would be wrong to overstate the contribution of such programmes to improving work organisation in these countries, they may form part of the story (OECD, 2010).

Cooperation around workplace innovation for mutual gains may be less problematic in Scandinavia, but this does not rule out successful projects in neoliberal economies, where the organisational context is permitting. The UK’s starting point is clearly very different, with weakened unions, fragile notions of social partnership and the absence of legal co-determination. The political Right has never liked programmes which focus on QWL with union involvement, while little interest was shown by New Labour governments between 1997 and 2010. Years of policy neglect raise the question of who would facilitate workplace projects, even allowing for the political will to develop such a programme. The obvious constituency – critical researchers on organisations and work – have, for the various reasons outlined above, tended to adopt what Beirne (2008: 679, 685) calls an ‘abstentionist position on practice’, focusing on detached critique rather than the ‘gritty matters’ of how to improve participation and work inside organisations (see also Warhurst, 2005). Pressure to publish in ‘elite’ academic journals, driven by high-stakes research assessment exercises, has not helped, notwithstanding a heightened emphasis on demonstrating research ‘impact’ in recent years.

Design, innovation and the workplace

The past decade has witnessed considerable interest in ‘design thinking’, or how designers solve problems. Whether it is supporting business innovation for competitive advantage (Boland and Collopy, 2004), redesigning public services (Parker and Heapy, 2006), or even rethinking the US Army’s approach to strategic warfare, interest has spread far and wide (Kimbell, 2011)! Much of this has been stimulated by US-based design consultancies, notably IDEO. Its chief executive describes design thinking as a ‘human-centred design ethos’, which deploys ‘the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity’ (Brown, 2008: 1–2).

The origins of ‘design thinking’, however, lie elsewhere in a design studies tradition stretching back 50 years concerned with how designers think when solving problems (Kimbell, 2011). Yet, it appears that even in the design community there is no established definition. One might identify certain things designers do when thinking about problems – understanding user needs and developing empathy, using visual tools, reframing problems by asking ‘what-if?’ questions, rapid prototyping through trial-and-error, etc. However, revealing a distinctive cognition process is hard to distil let alone communicate, especially to a non-design audience. Kimbell (2011: 289) notes that advocates have ‘trouble articulating what it is, whether all designers can do it … and why it might be a good thing that non-designers can learn it and do it too – or perhaps they do it already’.

There has been surprisingly little discussion as to whether designers risk succumbing to a managerial agenda. Kimbell (2011) cites a web-blog by Ladner (2009), who suggests that design thinking appeals to management because it ignores power, specifically the power to determine the conditions under which workers can express creativity which is always subordinate to the need to ‘control costs and secure profits’. For Ladner, this is where designers ‘feel most out of their depth’. Such comments do not appear to have generated a concerted reply from the design community. Discussing the application of design thinking to complex social problems in the public sphere, Blyth and Kimbell (2011: 15) insist, ‘It’s time to jettison the idea that a design process is a neutral space for a collaborative, consensual design activity. Contestation and difference are important parts of the process of design in any arena.’ They argue that designers’ primary role is to ensure all voices and viewpoints are brought to bear on the way problems are constructed. And yet, the literature on design thinking makes scant reference to the challenges presented by power imbalances within the workplace.

Parallels can be drawn with the literature around ‘arts-based’ interventions in the field of organisational development, including the use of theatre (Beirne, 2012). Commentators divide between those who see the transformative potential to open up workplace discussions (Nissley et al., 2004), and others who argue they are imprinted by organisational power structures which often result in artists reinforcing the corporate messages and values of the commissioning agent, i.e. management (Clark and Mangham, 2004). Antal et al. (2014: 270) refer to ‘great possibilities’ but note that artists are inclined to overlook ‘problems and issues of power’ and describe their interventions ‘in glowing terms’ so that other organisations adopt them.

Creating Cultures of Innovation

The Creating Cultures of Innovation (CCoI) project is run by the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) in partnership with the Institute of Directors (IoD). The initiative is avowedly experimental and centres on the construction of a ‘cross-functional’ project group, based upon a ‘diagonal slice of the organisation’, with members drawn from across the organisational hierarchy. The designers work with the project group over a series of workshops (typically eight or ten) which are held away from the immediate working environment.

Groups have an ‘open remit’. No prior assumptions are made as to what ‘the problem’ is or how it might be addressed; these are matters for the group to explore with the aid of design thinking methods such as games, brainstorming, visualisation, storyboarding, customer-journey mapping, researching customer/user needs and rapid-prototyping or ‘fast-fail’ trial-and-error. The aim is to create a learning space where ‘every idea is a good idea until proven otherwise’, participants have ‘equal voice’, and all are invited to ‘gain insight into new ways of being, new ways of seeing, new ways of doing, and new ways of thinking’. Disagreement and friction are seen as central to this process.

The ambition is to create a sustainable development legacy – a shift in organisational culture towards one that recognises and utilises untapped creative potential within the workforce to support innovation. The intervention endeavours to create an organisational ‘ripple’ by encouraging participants to engage other colleagues outside the workshop sessions so that this new way of working becomes ‘embedded’ in the business. CCoI works with organisations that are ‘curious’ and open to an approach which, unlike consultancy, cannot guarantee outcomes.

During its initial phase, CCoI worked with three organisations – a textile manufacturer (Scott and Fyfe), a service retailer and a ski resort – funded through the SFC’s skills utilisation programme. A second phase was launched in 2012, which would run for two years, funded by the SFC and participating organisations. There are currently five projects. One is exploring policy innovation inside the Scottish government. Three focus on business networks: large distilleries in the whisky industry, tourism organisations in the north of Scotland and small enterprises in the Highlands. A fifth project with a textile manufacturer was due to commence shortly. A partnership with the Adam Smith Business School at Glasgow University has been forged, which sees two senior academics working alongside designers in the workshops.

The discussion below focuses on the Scott and Fyfe project, regarded by the team as the most successful of the phase one projects. A semi-structured interview was conducted in 2011 with the programme manager and telephone interviews with the chief executive and two managers involved in the project. This was followed up with nine face-to-face interviews with members of the CCoI team undertaken in 2013. They included the programme manager, four designers involved in facilitating projects, two working on programme management, and a business school academic and an IoD member working alongside the designers.

Lessons and challenges

What can this initiative tell us about the challenges designers are likely to confront when seeking to support workplace innovation through better skills utilisation?

Conclusion

The UK government suffers from a policy blind spot on innovation. The commercialisation of scientific and technological innovations that can support leading-edge sectors is important, but leaves hanging the question of how to lever workers’ know-how, skills and learning for innovation in the wider economy. The challenge is not simply getting policy makers to acknowledge this policy gap but, where they do, translating this into effective policy interventions. None of this is easy. Buchanan et al. (2010: 35), in their international review of skills utilisation policies and programmes, liken progress to ‘grinding through granite’. The brutality of the metaphor emphasises the scale of the challenge as well as the policy commitment and timescale required, a point borne out by the experience of the Nordic countries even allowing for their supportive macro-institutional conditions. The granite is likely to be considerably tougher in neoliberal economies.

In the UK, a radical agenda would embrace institutional reform, underpinned by a robust platform of collective and individual worker rights, a re-strengthening of unions, a high minimum wage, strong social rights, legally backed voice mechanisms and supportive assistance to help firms upgrade their business strategy, technologies, management systems and training. Laying the foundations for the ‘high road’, while blocking off the ‘low road’, requires a break with a neoliberal growth model founded on flexible capital and labour markets. Such a project depends not only on political will but the ability to harness popular support.

This does not mean, however, that no progress can be made short of wholesale institutional transformation. In Scotland policy makers see the need to engage with skills utilisation. Warhurst and Findlay (2012) stress the need for further policy development which builds towards a scalable, well-resourced workplace innovation programme, involving employers, unions and dedicated researchers. With limited policy expertise and research capacity available, a steep learning curve beckons.

Accordingly, this article has explored whether design might contribute by exploring the CCoI initiative, one of the more innovative of the SFC’s skills utilisation projects. Are there any synergies with workplace innovation programmes? Both share an emphasis upon action research and the need to develop a multi-voiced learning process that allows for open-ended experimentation. However, there are differences. Workplace innovation programmes in the Nordic context seek improvements in organisational performance and the quality of working life, usually with the involvement of the social partners. In the CCoI work, improving the quality of working life is an implicit rather than explicit goal.

If the CCoI work has potential, it concerns the ability to provide employees with a learning space to raise ideas in the presence of external facilitators whose approach, unlike consultancy, is one of allowing all viewpoints to bear on a ‘problem’ yet to be defined. It would be naive, however, to believe designers and participants can step outside organisational power structures, or that their dialogue is unconstrained. There is a danger that such activity could become superficial or detached from the wider organisation, another managerial ruse that fails to offer real participation, influence or better jobs, with the progressive intentions of designers unwittingly compromised.

Designers who are committed to their ‘method’ and keen to demonstrate its worth may not be attuned to such issues, making self-evaluation through participant feedback, on its own, problematic. More generally, publicly funded workplace innovation/skills utilisation projects require robust external evaluation, combining both summative and formative assessment of what works and why, and which can draw upon in-depth longitudinal and comparative case studies. This may help to shed light on the challenges projects face and the measures of success that might be applied, an issue which would benefit from broad stakeholder input at both project and programme level.

Projects of this nature will have little appeal to mass-market organisations competing successfully through economies of scale and low-skill work design, and they clearly require an organisational context where the need to do something different and to involve workers in its ‘working out’ is accepted by management. A design-based approach may potentially contribute to a workplace innovation programme, but forging connections with critical researchers on work who are open to applied research and who bring with them a keen sense of organisational power dynamics would seem important.

The history of the PD movement suggests that while management support is needed for progressive projects, unions also have a role to play. There may be scope to consider whether the audience for such interventions might include unions seeking to engage with skills utilisation and crucially job redesign, neither of which has yet to be attempted by CCoI. Emphasising the need for policy makers to give a stronger lead, Warhurst and Findlay (2012: 17) remind us that ‘there is … extensive partnership working between employers and trade unions across major parts of some sectors in Scotland … largely centred on the public sector and a small number of large private sector workplaces’. This does not necessarily mean trade union presence or some form of social partnership is a precondition for such projects and in many SMEs such a starting point simply does not exist.

If, however, it is the breadth of workforce participation together with the depth and quality of workplace conversations that holds the key to progressive projects, conflicts and disagreements have to be opened up as the basis for developing joint solutions to organisational challenges which ‘stretch the collective sense of what is possible’ (Beirne, 2008: 687). Forging projects with open-minded management around such an ambitious agenda would be challenging but perhaps not impossible. These are early days, with the onus still on projects, like CCoI, to show that design can make a difference. It remains to be seen what direction policy on skills utilisation will take in Scotland. This is an area, however, where critical researchers can take the initiative through applied research as well as informing the development and evaluation of policy where forthcoming.