ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some prominent definitions of innovation, and it looks at how and where innovation governs professional work and responsibility. The chapter focuses on two forms of innovation that seem particularly popular now in organisations: practitioner-driven innovation, and quality improvement initiatives. It shifts to more constructive ground. This part is directed to practitioners, students and professional educators. The aim is to develop strategies for negotiating these innovation conflicts with both a critical and responsive sensibility. Surely innovative capacity needs to be developed also through an organisation's processes, structures, tools, job design and environmental linkages. This issue becomes sharpened in a particular version of practitioner-driven innovation that is now flourishing in health and social care: the quality improvement movement. In general, for public service professionals, the expected responsibility to innovate is on one hand a governing process driven by a particular notion of an entrepreneurial professional subject.
