The impact of contemporary dance methods on innovative competence development

The article presents a case of Swedish municipality to demonstrate how principles from contemporary dance and choreography can be used to design and implement long-term artistic interventions on strategic level and enable employees´ innovative competence development. The study described is a 2-year participatory action research project with practice-based training for 22 innovation leaders from different parts of organization. The results show that dance-based methods enabled participants to develop different innovative skills and strengthened their innovative competence. Unique contributions of dance methods are highlighted with the focus on providing a more humanistic and bottom-up approach to enabling innovation, balancing external organizational goals with the needs and drives of each individual. Choreographic tools provided an innovative frame of thinking about using body, movement, space and time in new ways in everyday work to enable individuals to feel better, develop their personal innovative practice and create conditions they need to be innovative.