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This chapter addresses the grand challenge of an aging society and the subsequent growing demand for in-home care for the elderly – often referred to as homecare. It examines how emergent homecare models in England differ from the “time and task” model and how they are shaping the care market. These models offer new approaches regarding what, how, and when care is delivered at home. Homecare providers face rising demand driven not only by population aging but also by market demand for personalized care, choice, continuity of care, and real-time availability. The landscape presents an opportunity for innovative models to become established, by offering a more inducing service design and value propositions that respond to customers' needs. Using the “business model canvas” to guide data collection, this study presents an ethnographic case analysis of four homecare organizations with distinct emergent homecare models. The study includes 14 months of field observation and 33 in-depth interviews. It finds that providers are becoming increasingly aware of evolving customer needs, establishing models such as the “uberization,” “community-based,” “live-in,” and “preventative” described in the chapter. These models are becoming more pervasive and are mostly market-driven; however, some of their innovations are market shaping. The major innovations are in their value propositions, partnership arrangements, and customer segments. Their value propositions focus on well-being outcomes, including choice and personalization for care users; their workforces are perceived to be a major stakeholder segment, and their networks of partners offer access to complementary services, investments, and specialist knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the multidimensional nature of social and nonprofit organisations' accountability and performance measurement systems (PMSs). It further considers how these systems help in defining outcome performance indicators downward to beneficiaries

The paper discusses participatory action research (PAR) within an Italian social enterprise. In order to increase dialogue, participation and engagement, the researchers adopted focus groups as a preferred method of investigation and conducted a broad documental analysis from July 2016 to March 2018. The paper discusses the gathered data in light of the social impact value chain as well as the multiple-constituency approach.

The findings support the idea that social and nonprofit organisations lack the expertise and resources to evaluate outcomes and impact; however, through PAR, the organisation defined their desired outcomes and ascertained which internal output measures were most likely to be correlated with these outcomes. Moreover, the findings highlight that nonprofits develop outcome measurements less frequently because they have more control over their immediate activities and outputs.

This research suggests the need to reinforce lateral and downward accountability based on mission and mission-based activities in order to make the performance management system of social and nonprofit organisation linked to the organisational strategies.

This paper innovates methodologically in two directions: 1) it adopts action research as a qualitative method, allowing the researcher to generate solutions to collectively-identified problems and 2) the paper's arguments are strongly supported by rich empirical exploration that occurred over a period of 20 months in an Italian social enterprise.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for studying the process of technology‐based service system innovation from a broad perspective using an approach that elucidates the non‐linear facets of this process. The framework draws on Lévy‐Strauss's concept of bricolage, which implies that individuals' “making do with resources at hand,” as opposed to managerial visions, can trigger innovation. This concept is combined with the notion of technological drift and with a model of emergentism.

The paper uses case study data from the Swedish elderly homecare setting.

The findings illustrate how the emergence of technology‐based care services can be triggered by an injection of energy in terms of a new technological resource being made available in an organization, proceeding as a continuous interaction between personnel repurposing and recombining resources at hand, positive and negative feedback dynamics, institutional regulations and culture‐related stabilizing mechanisms.

New services can arise as a result of a number of efforts and events that, in isolation, might appear insignificant. Taken together, and interacting with enabling and constraining forces that promote the emergence of certain new services and prevent others, such acts and events generate unpredictable outcomes. The result may be incremental but by no means trivial innovations.

The paper suggests an approach to innovation that complements conventional thinking in the new service development literature. The proposed framework can help to explain how and why certain new services emerge and why others do not in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of an organization's unlearning context and information systems (IS) capabilities on the organization's ability to challenge basic beliefs and to implement processes that are explicitly or tacitly helpful in the reception of new ideas (absorptive capacity). The authors also seek to examine the relationship between absorptive capacity and the existence and enhancement of innovativeness.

These relationships are examined through an empirical investigation of 54 doctors and 62 nurses belonging to 44 hospital‐in‐the‐home units (HHU) in Spain.

The results show that absorptive capacity is an important dynamic determinant for developing a HHU's innovativeness. Moreover, this relationship is best explained with two related constructs. Firstly, the HHU's unlearning context plays a key role in managing the tension between potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity. Secondly, the results also shed light on a tangible means for health managers to enhance their units' innovativeness (quality of service) through IS capabilities.

The cross‐sectional design does not allow observation of the short‐ and long‐term impact of absorptive capacity on the unlearning context, information systems capability and HHU's innovativeness. Although the model presented here proposes sequenced relationships between absorptive capacities (PACAP and RACAP), the unlearning context and IS capability, the authors measure all these constructs at one point in time.

This sequential model presented in this paper provides practical steps for managers interested in organizational structures that support organizational innovativeness.

The contribution of unlearning context is related to its ability to prepare the ground for innovation processes.

We argue that in order to address the contemporary challenges that organizations and societies are facing, the field of organization development (OD) requires frameworks and skills to focus on the eco-system as the level of analysis. In a world that has become economically, socially, and technologically highly connected, approaches that foster the optimization of specific actors in the eco-system, such as individual corporations, result in sub-optimization of the sustainability of the natural and social system because there is insufficient offset to the ego-centric purposes of the focal organization. We discuss the need for OD to broaden focus to deal with technological advances that enable new ways of organizing at the eco-system level, and to deal with the challenges to sustainable development. Case examples from healthcare and the agri-foods industry illustrate the kinds of development approaches that are required for the development of healthy eco-systems. We do not suggest fundamental changes in the identity of the field of organizational development. In fact, we demonstrate the need to dig deeply into the open systems and socio-technical roots of the field, and to translate the traditional values and approaches of OD to continue to be relevant in today’s dynamic interdependent world.

This chapter focuses on an innovative effort in the Italian context in which a complex web of partnerships was created as the foundation of an alternative model of health care. More specifically, the start-up of a health-care organization – Welfare Italia Servizi (WIS) – is analyzed and discussed with respect to its sustainability.

The process of organizing a sustainable health care is analyzed through the theoretical lenses of multi-stakeholders management and partnership perspectives.

The possibility of developing dense knowledge about the WIS’s case has stemmed from our collaboration with the organization board with regard to a research process intended to monitor the organizational start-up and its sustainability challenges.

The case provides new insights into the dynamic nature of building multi-stakeholder partnership in a complex environment; the developmental life-cycle challenge of multi-stakeholder partnership, and the meaning of sustainability. The case suggests a tapestry of issues such as how sustainability may be “paradoxical,” dynamic, led by different and sometimes conflicting logics, and changeable over time like a growing tree in an intricate forest.

The case can stimulate learning and discussions both within the community of practitioners and the community of academics with respect to which promising conditions could help address the challenge of starting-up a sustainable organization in the health-care field.

This study aims to explore nursing home and home care managers’ strategies in handling the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study has a qualitative design with semistructured individual interviews conducted digitally by videophone (Zoom). Eight managers from nursing homes and five managers from home care services located in a large urban municipality in eastern Norway participated. Systematic text condensation methodology was used for the analysis.

The managers used several strategies to handle challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including being proactive and thinking ahead in terms of possible scenarios that might occur, continuously training of staff in new procedures and routines and systematic information sharing at all levels, as well as providing different ways of disseminating information for staff, service users and next-of-kins. To handle staffing challenges, managers used strategies such as hiring short-term staff that were temporary laid off from other industries and bringing in students.

The COVID-19 pandemic heavily affected health-care systems worldwide, which has led to many health-care studies. The situation in nursing homes and home care services, which were strongly impacted by the pandemic and in charge of a vulnerable group of people, has not yet received enough attention in research. This study, therefore, seeks to contribute to this research gap by investigating how managers in nursing homes and home care services used different strategies to handle the COVID-19 pandemic.

In collaborative settings, such as research and development projects, obtaining the maximum benefit from knowledge management systems depends on the ability of the different partners to understand the conceptualisation underlying the system’s knowledge organisation. This paper aims to show how information/knowledge organisation in a multi-organisation project can be made more effective if the domain experts are involved in the specification of the systems semantic structure. A particular aspect is further studied: the role of conceptual relations in the process of collaborative development of such structures.

An action-research approach was adopted, framed by a socio-semantic stance. A collaborative conceptual modelling platform was used to support the members of a research and development project in the process of developing a lightweight ontology aiming at reorganising all the project information in a wiki system. Data collection was carried out by means of participant observation, interviews and a questionnaire.

The approach to solve the content organisation problem revealed to be effective both in the result and the process. It resulted in a better-organised system, enabling more efficient project information retrieval. The collaborative development of the lightweight ontology embodied, in fact, a learning process, leading to a shared conceptualisation. The research results point to the importance of the elicitation of conceptual relations for structuring the project’s knowledge. These results are important for the design of methods and tools to support the collaborative development of conceptual models.

This paper studies the social process leading to a shared conceptualisation, a subject that has not been sufficiently researched. This case study provides evidence about the importance of the early phases of the construction of ontologies, mainly if domain experts are deeply involved, supported by appropriated tools and guided by well-structured processes.