64 an important step towards insights into leadership practices and patterns, which helps understanding how school principals lead in the context of collaborative innovation. Additionally, future research could further explore the influence of school context variables on leadership practices in collaborative innovation or could link the leadership practices to outcome measures. Now that we have identified leadership practices and patterns in collaborative innovation, we will study the relation between leadership practices and outcome measures such as distributed leadership, teachers’ teaching skills, and student achievement in follow up studies. Furthermore, this current paper provides insights into the potential relevance of the context variables educational sector and school size. Future research could include school culture, since leading collaborative innovation in schools does involve school cultural change (Díaz-Gibson et al., 2014). Another relevant context variable may be the motives for collaborative innovation in schools, as schools can have different motives for implementing programs focusing on collaborative innovation: While some schools in our study started the program to improve their education in general, others started because they are under supervision of the Inspectorate of Education and consider this program as their last means of achieving sufficient educational quality. Furthermore, to understand why school principals enact certain leadership practices in a certain way, future research could study their rationales further. Our findings of leadership practices and patterns raise several questions that still remain to be answered, such as:Why do some school principals feel more connected or involved to the innovation processes, and/or why do they prioritise these processes in different ways? In addition, as this study focused on leadership practices in vertical processes, it would be valuable for future studies to focus on the horizontal processes, i.e., between teachers. Including teachers’ perspectives could also contribute to our understanding of the enactment of leadership practices of school principals, as the way teachers interact could be considered a relevant context variable. Lastly, a significant point to bear in mind is that the principals in our sample were all in the implementation phase of innovation. We noticed that some of the school principals talked about their leadership practices normatively. Key players and Facilitators both mentioned their respective excess or lack of involvedness. We consider this to be a reflection on a leadership struggle (as mentioned by Drago-Severson, 2012; Wildy & Louden, 2000). We would expect that leadership struggles change during the continuous improvement phase of innovations (Van de Ven et al., 1999) and the school principals did not yet seem fully satisfied with their enactment of leadership practices. We would encourage scholars to longitudinally study leadership practices to study the sustainability of leadership practices (Sørensen & Torfing, 2016; Van de Ven et al., 1999).
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