ICT and Training: A Proposal for an Ecological Model of Innovation

The process of innovation involves getting new ideas accepted and new technologies adopted and used. This paper considers the introduction of ICT in company training as an example of innovation. The question that must be addressed is: what factors inside and outside the company will support, and what factors will stand in the way of the adoption of these new methods? We argue that the acceptance of an innovation is affected as much by the complexity of the interactions between the people and the technology within an organization as by any supposedly objective characteristics of the innovation itself. In order to accommodate these complexities, and to provide a useful socio-technical perspective, an ecological model dealing with the interactions of human and non-human actors within a company ‘environment’ has been found to provide an effective viewpoint. This paper proposes and briefly elaborates such an ecological model.