When a Bottom-Up Innovation Meets Itself as a Top-Down Policy

Abstract

While practitioner-based research holds potential for closing the theory and practice gap, it is unclear how such research contributes to the policy and practice gap. This case study traces an educational innovation from its practice-based creation to its mandated implementation as public policy. Findings indicate that these bottom-up innovations face the same kind of implementation challenges as their top-down cousins. The authors take the position that practice-based innovations can engage in multiple contexts if knowledge creation (research) continues into knowledge utilization (policy and practice). The authors argue that this happens when knowledge utilization, like implementation, is understood as mutual adaptation. If innovations are frozen as knowledge creations in time and context, they cannot mutually adapt elsewhere. The result is that the good innovations of one practitioner will remain just that.