Although industry increasingly acknowledges that end user insight and participation may be a driver for innovation, we have experienced first-hand how difficult such knowledge sits with internal innovation processes, particularly in large, engineering heavy corporations. We see a loss of valuable opportunities if we do not pay attention to the organizational realities. We therefore focus on the social processes at work within an organization as contexts of both use and production. We believe that through a renewal of our ways of engaging, design ethnographers can help enable new pathways for change in large companies. Since 2009, we have been collaborating on developing a set of practices for nurturing innovation that we have termed the “Social Shaping of Innovation.” This paper describes the concepts and theories behind the framework, along with an overview of the participatory workshops we employed to refine, test, and grow our initial propositions.