The Collaboration Pyramid – Inspiring Radical innovation That People are More Willing to Adopt

Innovation is a paradox. On the one hand its benefits are manifest, but on the other, achieving those benefits is problematic. This research paper argues that we have been looking at innova- tion the wrong way. Instead of focussing on new products and processes, innovation should first seek to understand why people change. It introduces the collaboration pyramid, a model that sets out five different ways of thinking essential to successfully gain the intersubjectivity needed for the effective motivation of key stakeholders to adopt new practices. The model is derived from socio-cultural theory and brings together strands of older cultural psychology with recent advances in cognitive psychology that shed new light on situated learning. The research was inspired by scholars’ resolutions to the “learning paradox”, which argues that because learning is situated, it is impossible to learn new things that lie totally outside of our experience. Drawing on the work of the educational psychologist Carl Bereiter, the cultural psychologist Michael Cole, the creativity expert Keith Sawyer, as well as practitioner literature, the paper demonstrates how multi-disciplinary thinking can stimulate the emergence of new and better ways of seeing the world. The theoretical process is illustrated through two case studies from very different contexts that are researched through co-created autoethnography.
This paper makes an original contribution by drawing together diverse threads spanning economics, educational, and cultural/cognitive psychology to explain the challenges of effective innovation practice and describes how they might be overcome with reference to case studies