This chapter explores micro processes of collaborative innovation from a
learning perspective. The point of departure for the chapter is my ongoing research with
welfare service professionals who display considerable ambivalence towards
innovation, feeling both enthusiastic towards it and burdened by it. I start by framing
the Danish discourse of public collaborative governance in two empirical fields: sitebased
management and democracy in the 1990s, and social entrepreneurship and social
innovation in the 2000s. I demonstrate how the prevailing discourses offer a number of
scripts for action, performance and learning, which can produce important results.
However, by analysing learning in collaborative innovation processes from a
psychosocial perspective I also demonstrate how identification, ambivalence,
idealisation and defence are significant features of the professionals’ learning and
performance and consequently how contemporary collaborative innovation can lead
both to constructive and destructive processes.
Keywords: Public innovation, collaborative governance, discourses, learning,
micro processes.
