What Managers Find Important for Implementation of Innovations in the Healthcare Sector – Practice Through Six Management Perspectives

There is a growing expectation that many health organisations will implement innovations. One obstacle for innovative ideas to have an impact on the healthcare system in practice seems to be difficulties in the implementation phase. There is a lack of concretization of theoretical perspectives related to implementation of innovations. The research question answered by this article is: Which enabling factors can facilitate the specific step of moving from idea generation to implementation in a healthcare context?

The research was carried out with a qualitative action research methodology where the researchers took part in the innovation implementation project. The authors of this article were part of a collaborative innovation implementation project involving approximately 54 practitioners. The project was run by five stakeholders: (1) the Division of Assistive Technology in the Dalarna County Council Regional Healthcare Administration, (2) the Habilitation Division, (3) the Division for Home Care and Social Services in the municipality of Leksand, (4) Dalarna University, and (5) Uppsala University. Through a ‘Pearl growing’ technique six implementation management perspectives were, as a framework, identified and presented for the practitioners. The practitioners worked further to concretize these six perspectives. Data was collected through five workshops and collaborations between the researchers and the practitioners. Data was clustered regarding what the managers want to achieve within these six perspectives (ideal situation) and the main means for reaching this situation.

The study underlying this article generated 35 concrete enabling factors for successful innovation implementation, distributed over the initially presented six theoretical perspectives.

Concretizing management principles into enabling factors shows, on the one hand, that the theoretical principles have practical value, but on the other that they must be adopted to the specific circumstances of each organization, and that too abstract principles can hardly be operationalized.