Involving Employees in Strategy innovation

Strategy as a practice and continuous innovation approaches are combined to conceptualise dilemmas of short versus long term and to analyse a case of employee participation as a particular example of strategy innovation. The case is a medium size textile company developing its strategy involving some of its employees. Even if managers still dominate, some processes of direct involvement of employees occur. The employees are in particular active in supplementing overall strategic goals and directly shaping one sub strategy, that of ‘process’. Strategy practices include planning, Porterian and Balanced Score Card consultancy, an ‘open space’ workshop and organized strategy projects. Especially the latter two are important in facilitating the employee involvement. The case however also exhibit enterprise situated praxis’s like mitigation of taboos.