ABSTRACT
In the literature on innovation in services, it is often taken for granted that interactions between stakeholders occurs as collaboration without any friction. By taking the tensions and conflicts between the stakeholders as the focus of the analysis, the ongoing changes in the relationship between the development of such conflicts and the development in the innovation process over time were followed. As a consequence, each set of stakeholders needs to deal with issues, needs and expectations that might be very different from their own, which, in turn, causes tensions between parties. Such tensions trigger a dialectic motor of change, which in the study was named stakeholder dialectics. Since 2000, the intertwining of tensions and conflicts between Novozymes’s interest groups and the innovation processes carried out in their network developed over time and went through four critical phases or temporal brackets: a de-merge crisis, a financial crisis, a global shift and an organisational change.
