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New opportunities to nurture good ideas for innovation arise as firms use web-based ideation platforms for collective idea generation and development. What influences creative performance in firm-internal collective idea development is however not as well researched as idea generation and thus an important area of research is the feedback and commenting on ideas. More specifically, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas in collective firm-internal online idea development.

An empirical study has been performed, drawing on data collected from a Swedish multi-national company using a web-based system for collective firm-internal ideation. The investigation explicitly captures the effects on ideation performance played by idea development contributions, in terms of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas.

The empirical results show that idea development is significantly influenced by feedback timeliness as well as by the knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas. Specifically, it is found that longer time to feedback and an increased knowledge overlap result in an increased likelihood of idea acceptance. However, beyond a certain point, the positive effects of a longer time to feedback and increased knowledge overlap decrease, resulting in curvilinear relationships with idea acceptance.

The results do not only shed new light on theory about collective idea development, but also provides management implications for collective firm-internal ideation. As the data used in the study has been collected in one single firm, care should be taken in generalizing the results to other domains.

The results inform managers that it is not always better to involve more individuals in these emergent and distributed ideation systems, but that it might be beneficial to take measures to exercise some control in terms of when distributed and diverse employees can freely join in and out, especially considering the diversity of ideas, comments and creators.

The results from the empirical study reveal the effects of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap on idea development. This provides us with new insights on the complex dynamics at place in collective firm-internal idea development and offers implications for how we can fruitfully manage this process.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a quality improvement (QI) intervention in primary health facilities providing childbirth care in rural Southern Tanzania.

A QI collaborative model involving district managers and health facility staff was piloted for 6 months in 4 health facilities in Mtwara Rural district and implemented for 18 months in 23 primary health facilities in Ruangwa district. The model brings together healthcare providers from different health facilities in interactive workshops by: applying QI methods to generate and test change ideas in their own facilities; using local data to monitor improvement and decision making; and health facility supervision visits by project and district mentors. The topics for improving childbirth were deliveries and partographs.

Median monthly deliveries increased in 4 months from 38 (IQR 37-40) to 65 (IQR 53-71) in Mtwara Rural district, and in 17 months in Ruangwa district from 110 (IQR 103-125) to 161 (IQR 148-174). In Ruangwa health facilities, the women for whom partographs were used to monitor labour progress increased from 10 to 57 per cent in 17 months.

The time for QI innovation, testing and implementation phases was limited, and the study only looked at trends. The outcomes were limited to process rather than health outcome measures.

Healthcare providers became confident in the QI method through engagement, generating and testing their own change ideas, and observing improvements. The findings suggest that implementing a QI initiative is feasible in rural, low-income settings.