Ongoing Projects

NACHOS - Navigating the Chaos of Innovation and Transformation

The graduate school "Navigating the Chaos of Innovation and Transformation" (NACHOS) at Otto von Guericke University investigates how innovations can be successful from a technical, economic and social perspective. The aim is to research and link social, cultural and economic factors in the introduction of innovations. A particular focus is on the active involvement of employees, customers and society in the innovation process.
NACHOS is a joint project of the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics and the Faculty of Human Sciences and pursues an integrated approach. It uses perspectives and methods from the humanities and economics to specifically examine the social and cultural factors of innovation and their interaction with economic or technical aspects.
The guiding question is how an innovation can be technically, economically and socially successful and how these three dimensions relate to each other in order to ultimately improve the conditions for the success, adaptation and dissemination of innovations. Methodological approaches from the economic and human sciences are combined for this purpose.

Completed Projects

ALL:konkret: The world of work as a context for lifelong learning – Ethnographic studies on actors, agendas and arenas

Duration: 1 January 2020 – 31 December 2024

As a continuation of the ‘BWB:konkret’ project, ‘ALL:konkret’ also aims to provide an inductive description of the reality of continuing vocational training in companies. During ethnographic visits to companies lasting several weeks, data, documents and information that are not pre-structured by hypotheses are collected, for example through work shadowing, participant observation, individual and group interviews or the analysis of documents. The collected data is analysed in joint research workshops and fed into further phases of data collection and evaluation. The results of this circular research process are case-specific organisational analyses that reveal the individual specifics of the reality of continuing vocational training in an organisation and make them discussable for both research and personnel and organisational development in the organisations under investigation. The organisational analyses produced are also reflected upon in joint workshops with the organisations under investigation. The specific objectives are as follows:

• Reconstruction of structures, strategies, organisational forms and technologies of workplace learning (system perspective)
• Reconstruction of meaningful motives, action-oriented theories, contradictory requirements for action and cooperation in workplace continuing education practice (actor perspective)
• Reconstruction of historical lines of development, cycles of conditions, decision-making processes and the interlinking of continuing vocational training with external and social processes (process perspective)
• Extraction of criteria for quality and professionalism in non-formal continuing education in workplace contexts
• Organisational and professional classification of continuing vocational training
• Development of a scheme for surveying corporate learning cultures and educational practice
• Development of conceptual approaches and action strategies for the further development of an innovative continuing education policy
• Didactic preparation of case studies for teaching purposes in the academic training and continuing education of educational staff

View project in the research portal