Magee Rehabilitation Hospital
Key Points
Innovation has become management’s new imperative. Everybody wants to be the next Apple, Google, Netflix , nobody wants to loose their inspiration and their innovation force.
You’ll feel inspired, then scared and then have a few beers and go about your business.
What’s missing is a clear set of principles for action. What good is Steve Job’s unfailing design sense when I can’t even get my outfits to match? How can Google’s technological supremacy be relevant to me when I can’t even figure out my TV remote? In other words, we need to take innovation down from the presentation screen and into working life. Here’s how to do that.
Nevertheless, I think we can move the ball further by breaking it down into three discrete areas of activity.:
- Competency: Every organization has its own history and set of capabilities which determine its innovation competency. An old-line industrial firm can’t just wake up one day and decide to operate like a hot Silicon Valley tech startup overnight, nor should they try. However, every enterprise can improve.
- Strategy: As an manager knows, resource allocation is critical to strategy and therefore needs to be an integral part of aligning innovation to strategic objectives.
- Management: Even the most competent firm which deploys resources wisely still needs to manage innovation effectively. This is my primary focus.
Research on innovations in healthcare organizations published between 1994 and 2004 are here reviewed and summarized.
The majority of the 31 identified studies dealt with the adoption of innovations and new practices and were cross-sectional designs applying quantitative methods, or multiple case studies applying qualitative methods. Five pathways for future research are recommended: (a) Multilevel approaches studying innovation simultaneously on individual, group, and organizational levels; (b) a combination of quantitative and qualitative data; (c) use of longitudinal designs (innovation both as the dependent and independent variable); (d) application of experimental designs in interventions; and (e) exploration of innovation generation and structural innovations.
Jeffrey Brown
Information System Director at Magee Rehabilitation
