The Bricolage Concept: A Bottom-Up Approach to Innovation

The Bricolage Concept: A Bottom-up Approach to Innovation

The article, "A Bottom-Up Perspective on Innovations Mobilizing Knowledge and Social Capital Through Innovative Processes of Bricolage", analyzes the Bricolage Concept that embodies an innovative vision which is based on reemploying assets being at hand, in contrast to a "pioneering approach," aimed at a breakthrough concept (Andersen, 2008) which discounts the historic institutional values, norms, and routines of established organizations. Bricolage is a concept based on taking what you have on hand and configuring those resources to meet or create innovative opportunities, regardless of the system, idea, or technology. Bricolage ascribes the importance of utilizing corporate knowledge and human experience accumulated over the years in an organization's efforts to break new ground and create new opportunities. These fundamentals focus on recapitalizing known capabilities, corporate cultures, and institutionalized know-how to initiate innovativeness through bottom-up developments, utilizing social capital (Andersen, 2008).

The applied research in this article reasons that the modern approaches of innovative thought and their tendency to portray the past heritage, including know-how, values, norms, and principles, as a road block to future innovation, need to be resolved. In that respect, the article clarifies research that has applied the concept of bricolage in analyzing innovations, including the designing of new products, diversification of the product portfolio, and the creation of institutional arrangements and governance structures (Andersen, 2008). The novel approach of bricolage is based on a bottom-up mobilization, which is critical for generating creativity. This is more realistic in comparison to attempting to realize innovation based on abstract or purely conceptual alternatives. The fact is, the concept of creative problem solving in support of an innovative process is more valid when it evolves primarily through processes of recombining elements of the organizational or institutional legacy (Andersen, 2008).

Andersen's research incorporates case studies that revolve around conditions that produce partnerships, which resulted in an organizational framework that furthered innovative bricolage. In some cases, bricolage focused on how institutions prepared to evolve or compete in changing markets (Andersen, 2008). Henry E. Aldrich states that new opportunities cannot be created because things of the past are seemingly present, i.e., social structures, organizations and people's beliefs. Additionally, it's believed that the imagination is limited to what is available to understanding; hence, one cannot understand what's not known. But by using what is available, you can create new concepts and ideas (Aldrich, 1999).

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