Regulating for Innovation in Workplace Production and Employment Systems : A Preliminary Discussion of Issues and Themes

An important dimension of this broader concept of innovation is 'workplace innovation'. One form of workplace innovation is the adoption of 'high performance' or 'high involvement' approaches within firms, such as work teams, multi-skilling and employee involvement schemes. In this paper, we are interested in exploring the idea of workplace innovation in a more expansive sense - that is, in terms of the ordering of work organisation, production and industrial relations systems in ways that support other forms of innovation. Several studies have identified a positive link between innovation at the workplace level, and innovation in products, markets and technologies (and so on). This, in turn, is said to carry significant benefits in terms of business productivity and performance. The core question that we wish to examine in this paper (and in the broader project that it forms part of) is the potential role of regulation in supporting and advancing workplace innovation