Innovation Processes in Cooperative Organizations: Results of a Case Study Research

Abstract

One of the main problems of cooperative decision-making, when it comes to the implementation of innovations, is the involvement of multiple levels — the cooperative’s and member’s level. From an evolutionary economic viewpoint this raises the question of how the creation of novelty and the dissemination of knowledge within a cooperative enterprise works. This study investigates a cooperative of bakers. The idealised innovation process together with the findings of our study allows us to differentiate four forms of knowledge communication (promoter, source, recipient, feedback process). Our three cases show that, depending on the type of innovation (product, process or systemic), the different stages of the model process deviate from one another. Lastly, we will identify the different types of knowledge communication that we found in our three cases.