Innovation in hospitals: piloting a tool for investigating contributions of hospital employees to innovation

Taran Thune and Magnus Gulbrandsen
Additional contact information
Taran Thune: TIK Center for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway

No 20161211, Working Papers on Innovation Studies from Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo

Abstract: This paper addresses the question of how hospital employees contribute to the generation of innovations and to what extent hospitals function as a conducive environment for innovative work. The motivation behind this exploratory study was primarily to identify the diversity of innovation activities in hospitals, with the goal of developing and testing a survey tool that can adequately capture this diversity. Although conceptual and empirical research on the characteristics of medical and health related innovations has been carried out, the role of hospitals in such innovations is more often assumed rather than empirically tested. We argue that innovation in public hospitals is still not well understood and contribute to understanding through a pilot study carried out in four public hospitals in Norway. A preliminary analysis indicates that there are different modes of innovative work in hospitals, as suggested by some of the literature, and that different kinds of employees are involved in distinct sets of activities. The survey tool that we developed seems to be able to capture the diversity of innovation-related activities, but there were problematic aspects related to the sampling and recruitment of respondents. Suggestions for further exploration and testing are discussed.

Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-hea, nep-ino and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sv.uio.no/tik/InnoWP/tik_working_paper_20161211.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tik:inowpp:20161211

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers on Innovation Studies from Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by H&kon Normann ().