“You´re supposed to interfere…” : Conducting leadership through meaning-making in new product development

The theses explore how leadership is conducted through meaning-making in New Product Development-work. Leadership through meaning-making is here understood as the acts of enabling one-self and others to act competently and constructively for realizing shared goals through interactions where both meaning and meaning-makers are under continuous development. Innovation has the last couple of decades become a buzz-word, bearing both the promise of survival and the risk of failure. Much attention has thus been placed on finding ways of reducing risk of failure and enhancing possibilities for success. The major challenge for conducting leadership in innovation processes is that as innovation processes involve both exploration and exploitation this typically demands quite different forms of leadership. Also, while existing knowledge and solutions are of decisive importance for short-term survival, one also has to break with current understandings to survive in the long run. A central focus for innovation research has thus been to find ways of handling these apparently contradicting leadership tasks for securing the need for both exploration and efficiency. The solution to this challenge has often been sought in ways of organizing the innovation processes, separating the explorative tasks from the exploitative tasks in order to conduct leadership according to the different tasks. An underlying assumption to most of these research contributions is that innovation processes are rational processes whereas human factors are input factors in line with other input factors, the outcome of the process is innovation. This thesis questions these rational understandings of innovation-processes, by exploring New Product Development (NPD) through a relational approach where meaning and identity co-constitute one another and create direction for further development. The theoretical basis for this relational approach draws on the work of George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Erving Goffman, Norbert Elias, and newer contributions from complexity theory and pragmatism. The ontological basis for the study draws on the dialectical understanding of reality found in the work of Hegel, and thus questioning the dualistic understanding typical for system theory, which dominates innovation-theory. The purpose of the study is to contribute to a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of how leadership is conducted through meaning-making, and where the conducting of identity is central for