Anne Reff Ped­er­sen

What is the most important impact your research and academic work have on society? 
The most important impact of my research lies in showing how innovation does not only emerge from large-scale reforms or managerial strategies, but also from the everyday practices of professionals and staff. By making these forms of frontline innovation visible, my work helps organisations and policymakers to better support adaptive and meaningful change. This contributes to more resilient healthcare services and more effective collaborations between public institutions and companies. 

What are the societal or other challenges that you are working on solving? 
I focus on the challenge of making innovation work across organisational and professional boundaries. In healthcare, this means addressing the tensions that arise when new technologies and reforms meet established routines. In different policy contexts, the broader challenge is how to bridge institutional divides in ways that respect professional expertise while also achieving societal goals and improve individual lifes. 

What motivates you? 
I am motivated by the creativity and resilience I see in users, professionals, managers and staff as they navigate organisational complexity. Their capacity to create new solutions in the midst of constraints and competing demands inspires me to study and understand how everyday practices can become drivers of innovation and change. 

What is your vision or ambitions with your research and academic work? 
My vision is to advance an understanding of innovation as a social and temporal process that unfolds in everyday work. I aim to provide knowledge that enables organisations to build on existing practices and relationships, rather than imposing change from above. Ultimately, my ambition is to contribute to organisations that are both professionally sustainable and societally valuable. 

What are your academic interests? 
I am especially interested in the intersections between organisation, innovation and narrative. My research combines organisational ethnography with narrative approaches, focusing on how professionals construct meaning across time and how stories shape organisational life. Much of my work centres on healthcare organisations, but I currently also study together with post doc. Mathilde H. Carlsen cross-sectoral local collaborations. 

How does your research help companies and people? 
My research helps companies, schools and healthcare organisations to better understand how collaborations can be sustained across institutional boundaries, and how innovation can be nurtured from everyday practices rather than only through top-down strategies. For people, it provides insights into how users, professionals and managers can find coherence, agency and purpose in times of change, thereby strengthening both their work and their organisations. 

Five key themes in my research interests: 

Everyday and frontline innovation – how employees and professionals develop new ways of working in their daily practices. 

Organisational complexity and change – how organising shapes, and is shaped by, people, work relations and time. 

Narrative approaches to organisations – how stories, narrative time and fragmented meaning-making create coherence, tensions and purpose. 

Healthcare organisation and innovation – how technologies, reforms and cross-sectoral initiatives are negotiated and implemented in healthcare. 

Cross-sectoral partnerships – particularly how public organisations  and companies collaborate and reconfigure organisational boundaries