Omvärldsbevakning : Värdeskapande eller Luftslottsaktivitet?

Sammanfattning: This study set off in a notion, rather than insight; there seems to be a lot of talk about how innovation should thrive and how the environment should be scanned, but not so much about the relationship in between. While the usefulness of sharing information about the environment is seldom questioned, how the information sharing comes to play is as seldom a topic for debate. This sparked our curiosity and to explore the phenomena deeper we conducted interviews with nine out of the ten co-workers within the unit for Research & Innovation at LFV. The result indicates that while environmental scanning was believed to be an important part of their work, they had no strategic guidelines on how it should be exerted and it was viewed to be more of a passive part in their practical work. Furthermore, their work situation was highly individualized and autonomous, which made them very motivated to scan the environment, but also caused a certain discrepancy in how they perceived it. This combination of disparate perspectives, high motivation and lack of unanimity resulted in a rather narrow monitoring of the environment and an imbalance between the interest and the actual use of information. While information was greatly sought after by everyone, the information shared was not perceived as meaningful in the same extent. Some co-workers meant this induced an overload of information and therefore became more restrictive in their information sharing, but others became frustrated that the information they shared never seemed to be used and thus shared even more as a response. Hence, the effect was not only self-fulfilling and reflexive, but also inhibited the environmental scanning from becoming a significant element in the innovation process.