No short cuts: innovation work is about presence, ordinary labor

These are the results of Ulla-Maija Uusitalo's doctoral thesis. She examines the creation of new knowledge from the perspective of concrete and everyday practices, striving to understand how experts from different fields work together to innovate. The creation of interdisciplinary new knowledge and innovations leadership that is present and understands people -- not the leadership of projects, workload and cost calculations or extremely refined goals according to some general best practices. Every situation is unique, just like the people that participate in them. There is no short cut to understanding this fact -- a leader has to get involved in the same manner as the participants.

In both academic research and the media, the future of individuals, companies and entire national economies are seen as being dependent on their ability to produce new knowledge, renew and innovate. Taking into account the fact that modern society faces very complicated challenges, collaboration between experts from different backgrounds is seen as a critical source of innovations. However, there is little research on what the concrete work related to this 'interdisciplinary knowledge creation' is like and how it should be led.

Ulla-Maija Uusitalo, M. Sc. (Economics) and M. Sc. (Social Sciences), will defend her dissertation entitled "Show me your brain! Stories of Interdisciplinary Knowledge Creation in Practice. Observations and Experiences from Aalto Design Factory, Finland" at noon on 20 August 2015 in room 1382 at Lappeenranta University of Technology.

The dissertation has been published in the Acta Universitatis Lappeenrantaensis research series number 649. ISBN 978-952-265-819-7 and ISSN 1456-4491. The dissertation is available for reading on the Lappeenranta University of Technology database at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-265-820-3.