ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how innovative design thinking supports everyday innovation by mobilizing participants and redirecting sensemaking. In most cases of everyday innovation the participants collaborate to solve local problems on their own. The chapter describes theoretical assumptions in the collaborative innovation literature, concerning problem solving via collaborations between external and internal stakeholders. It presents findings from an ethnographic study of two local collaborative innovation projects, both of which concerned empowering patients. The first project was located at a breast cancer ward in a public hospital in the Capital Region. The second project was located in a neurology ward at the national hospital in the capital, where the local management group hired a voluntary patient ambassador to design a new project for the ward. The chapter illustrates how participation in local innovation projects is conditioned upon shared sensemaking and narratives—more concretely, how local values of both external and internal participants are centered around concepts of patient empowerment in everyday innovation processes.
