Fostering innovation is an essential task for companies, particularly in the dynamic and constantly changing software industry. Whereas it is widely acknowledged that the innovative capacity of a company depends crucially on how well it supports employees in realizing ideas, there is a lack of explicit, practitioner-oriented guidance on how these can communicate their ideas purposefully. We contribute to this field with an exploratory field study, in which we interviewed 32 experienced innovators at a major Swiss banking software provider, and collected objects through which they communicated ideas. We analyzed the collected data applying three types of causal analysis – creative causation, active causation, and passive causation. The outcome of this research is a nascent design theory that provides structured prescriptions on how to communicate ideas through what we term “innovation artifacts”. In brief terms, our study shows that innovation artifacts should enable innovators to persuade and collaborate with relevant stakeholders.
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