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This chapter insists that evaluation of the process and results of cocreation is a precondition for continuous improvement and helps maintain support from external sponsors and funders. The main benefits of systematic evaluation of cocreation are learning and legitimacy rather than control and allocation. The chapter scrutinizes the two most common evaluation tools, formative and summative evaluation, and finds that they both fail to appreciate the emergent character of cocreation processes. The solution to this problem is to supplement formative and summative evaluation with developmental evaluation, which prompts the participating actors to engage in a critical interrogation of what they are doing, the reasons for doing it, and the results they achieve. Finally, the chapter explains how the commitment of developmental evaluation to using real-time data in the evaluation of change theories can be pursued through a collective impact strategy.

Processes of novelty generation and adoption have received much more attention than novelty evaluation. This paper explores the internal processes enacted by organizations to recognize and assess novel ideas for further implementation by focusing on the role that artifacts play in identifying the creative potential of an idea versus another one. Our empirical study focuses on the evaluation of novelty in the form of new experiences and builds on the analysis of two highly creative organizations, elBulli restaurant, led by chef Ferran Adrià, and the Italian Drama Academy Nico Pepe. We find that organizations implement three distinct processes to evaluate the novelty of ideas: analyzing, structuring, and formalizing. In these processes, artifacts play a key role in making novel ideas tangible by anticipating audiences’ reactions, integrating the novelty generated into an organizational corpus of knowledge, and consolidating novel ideas for future applications. Our results show that these processes take place iteratively in all phases of the idea’s journey, increasingly leading to the collective identification and assessment of novelty.

Decisions which are based on formally organized evaluation processes are widespread in the academic world. In order to develop a theoretical framework which can be used to systematically analyze various evaluation-based decision-making procedures, this chapter focuses on the example of appointment procedures for professorships in German universities. Drawing on systems theory, we start with theorizing universities as formal organizations in order to explain how organizational structures generally affect decision-making procedures. Then three dimensions of academic decision-making are introduced – temporal, social, and matter-of-fact – which are the main cornerstones of our analytical framework. By applying this framework to appointment procedures for professorships, different phases can be distinguished (temporal), participants and their interests as well as their influence potentials come into view (social), and different types of criteria for assessing the candidates can be identified (matter-of-fact). The exemplary application of the framework shows its analytical advantages as an adaptable means of investigating a broader array of (academic) evaluation-based decision-making procedures.

Purpose – In the last decades, Italian healthcare organisations have been subject to important normative changes, aimed at increasing their efficiency. As a response, performance measurement and evaluation (PME) systems have been introduced. The present study attempts to examine PME system changes as institutional processes. In studying such processes the healthcare literature acknowledges the presence of two logics: managerial and professional, as peculiar to healthcare settings, whose convergence or divergence can explain the success of any institutional process.

Design/methodology/approach – We adopt Busco et al.'s (2007) framework as an approach for unbundling PME system change into four relevant coordinates, namely: (1) the object (PME system), (2) the subjects (institutional forces), (3) the place and time of change (the managerial and professional logics) and (4) the how and why change happens (change as an institutional process). We conducted a longitudinal case study at a large teaching hospital in Southern Italy, directed to interpret PME system changes during the period from 1998 until 2009.

Findings – Our observation distinguishes episodes of successful institutional processes, where the introduced innovations are transformed into objectivated practices, from episodes of missed institutionalisation, where new procedures were rapidly abandoned.

Research and social implications – This theoretical framework can be useful for interpreting the PME system changes in different institutional contexts.

Originality – The Busco et al.'s framework allows us to understand PME system changes by integrating the perspectives from Neo-Institutional Sociology, representing healthcare organisational responses to external institutional pressures, and Old-Institutional Economics, conceptualising PME system changes as an institutionalisation process.

Evaluation is the process by which we estimate how things should go, explore how things are going, and determine how things went in terms of course redesign. In this chapter, we examine formative and summative methods for assessing student learning and establishing teacher effectiveness and course quality. Evaluation is a subjective, value-laden process. To introduce the rigor needed to make it meaningful, evaluation should be multifaceted, planned in advance, made transparent to learners, and employ valid and reliable methods. Moving courses online presents both opportunities and challenges for evaluation. We explore ways to implement assessment to make full use of the advantages of technology while mitigating the problems associated with online delivery.