Journey to Sustainable Innovations and Global Sustainable Production

Knowing that Jan grew up in a sports family, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the forming moments behind his interest in participating in creating global sustainable innovation and production systems was sports-related. He played tennis on a semi-professional level, but his trainer never consulted him about how he felt when he should hit the ball. He was just given instructions. Therefore, he only hit the ball as the trainer wanted when he was around. That did not deliver the right results. He felt it was wrong. He was 15 years old. He got unmotivated and stopped playing tennis.

Three years later, he was deciding the theme for his high-school thesis. His class had to choose a topic about now-former Yugoslavia. Josip Tito ran Yugoslavia, and he practised self-management at the factories. Self-management meant that participatory committees ran factories. Jan realized that while participation functioned as a motivational factor for the employee’s, such involvement did not work in connection to creating efficient factories. He learned that organising effective participation requires deep employee participation (i.e. participation reflecting everybody’s voice, especially the lead users’ and forerunners’).

This inspired him to dig deeper into the link between industrial growth and participation in his first and second year at the University of Copenhagen where he did research at Carlsberg in Copenhagen. This time he learnt about the role of unions in ensuring efficient participatory processes.

Later he became interested in the role of participation and global development. He came across Chambers’ Participatory Rural Appraisal, a very hands-on tool for working with rural areas. He went to Nepal, tried out the tool. It worked. Yet, his primary interest was the industrial setting, so he continued working with participation in industrial environments. He got inspired by Tiger economics’ industrial growth (especially by what was happening in Taiwan). He travelled to Taiwan to study if it was true that autocratic political systems without participation were more effective than democratic and participatory ones. He left convinced that participation was indeed critical for development, and participation was practised in nuanced ways in the Tigers, just not at the official level.

As a PhD, he started to explore many of the conditions underlying developing efficient global innovation and production systems. Inspired by the innovation systems literature, he worked with iterative user relations processes (another word for participatory approaches). Also, he explored the importance of co-location for such participatory processes. He subsequently worked with participatory methods and global innovation and production systems in many countries and industries worldwide. Around 2015, he started to link it much closer to social sustainability and became engaged in a project about participatory approaches to transform non-sustainable global production processes into socially sustainable global production systems. He worked mainly with theories stemming from engineering and organisational behaviour in these projects.

Since then, he has also started working with the linkages between participation and environmental sustainability. He has become a strong advocate of integrating operations management (efficiency) with innovation tools (new solutions) through participatory processes involving lead users and forerunners. Participatory processes incorporating lead users and forerunners, he believes, is the right way forward because it integrates participation without falling prey to easy fixes.