1. The Introduction: An Overview to Workplace Innovation Research

The objective of this chapter is to provide an overview to workplace innovation research and to rationalise the book’s focus. Growth trajectories and key knowledge clusters were uncovered by a citation network generated from 144 workplace innovation publications sourced from a systematic literature search executed in the Scopus database. The analysis identified the presence of six main knowledge clusters residing in leadership and organisational culture; forms of work organisation and quality of work; employee participation; occupational stress; occupational safety including health innovation and innovation in the social aspects of organisation. Future research areas were suggested in terms of level of analysis in research designs, organisational behaviour and practice, research contexts and research design methods. These provided the rationalisation of the book’s focus which is organised under the following six areas: workplace innovation in contexts, determinants, processes, outcomes, transformations and ecosystems.