Towards a dialogic management of cognitive competence

In this paper we examine the nature of the competences needed for promoting innovation and change. Taking our experiences as the starting point, we examined the literature and interviewed managers and those responsible for innovation in enterprises and discovered that our research findings contradict the simplistic view of innovation facilitation and management material in the work place. Our research suggests that for innovation to take place two contradictory notions, the order principle and the disorder principle, have to be engaged at the same time. As a philosophy, the Positivistic epistemology is unable to handle these contradictions. Therefore we suggest the use of Morin's “dialogy” as a way of managing these contradictions essential for innovation.