Technological Innovation and Social Change

Workplace Development as Part of Broad-based Innovation Policy: 
Exploiting and Exploring Three Types of Knowledge
❚❚ Tuomo Alasoini
Director, Tekes – Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation,
Adjunct Professor (Sociology), University of Helsinki, Finland

"Abstract
This paper looks at the possibilities that a broad-based innovation policy contained by the national
innovation strategy recently adopted in Finland opens up for the promotion of workplace
innovations and examines the types of knowledge needed in workplace development. The author
highlights the interconnections between workplace development and the prerequisites of both
economic growth and the preservation of the Finnish welfare state. The paper also aims to explain
why, in addition to the productivity of work, improving the quality of working life should feature as
an increasingly important aim in the innovation policy of the future. An argument for the need of
three types of knowledge in workplace development – design knowledge, process knowledge and
dissemination knowledge – is made, together with an overview on new developments in each of
those three domains. In conclusion, the author demonstrates how problems in the productivity of
work and the quality of working life can be simultaneously tackled with at work organization level
through two kinds of development approaches....."