Introduction:

Our society is gradually moving towards a knowledge economy: an economy in which the application of knowledge replaces capital, raw materials and labour as the main means of production. The essential ingredient of products and services is the inherent knowledge. The ability to gather information, generate new knowledge, disseminate and apply this knowledge to achieve improvements and innovations is an organisation’s knowledge productivity (Kessels 2004). Knowledge productivity is increasingly regarded as the dominant economic factor in a knowledge society and it highlights the importance of a conducive learning environment that facilitates innovation. This paper summarises two recent studies in the domain of knowledge productivity and innovation, trying to answer the following research questions:

1. If innovation can be regarded as the outcome of a learning process in a social network, what are the main characteristics of the supportive learning environments?

2. Which are the relevant design principles for developing a supportive learning environment for innovation?

The provisional answers to these questions follow from the results of the studies by De Jong, Verdonschot & Kessels (2008), Verdonschot (2009) and De Jong (2010) which examined the innovation practices in 35 cases in the period 2003-2009. The case studies have been conducted on the basis of a conceptual framework which will be presented in the following section.