Search results

The purpose of this paper is to define the factors of innovativeness in the context of employee involvement and study how these factors could be affected by an employee-driven innovation (EDI) process.

This study follows a quantitative approach through a survey. The survey data were collected from a case organisation, where employees designed an innovation manual in a participatory process to support their daily innovativeness.

According to the results, the EDI manual process can assist the organisation in developing their ideation and organising structures. The employees felt that their ideas were appreciated more after the innovation manual process. Understanding about innovation and innovativeness was also increased. In between two survey rounds, the focus of the most urgent development targets had shifted from internal idea management practices towards customer ideas, cooperation and appreciation of different ideas. This indicates that the internal innovation system has to work before it is reasonable to involve other stakeholders.

The study presents an empirical example of an employee-driven process in the context of public sector healthcare. It increases understanding about the importance of employee involvement in the innovation manual development process and how this process affects the factors of innovativeness.

Studies with a user approach in a public service context are still rare, making the contribution of this study worthwhile. This paper aims to present a case of facilitating innovativeness by involving stakeholder groups in the development of service production in the public sector. The case is related to the provision of housing and well‐being services to ageing people. The study proposes focusing on the front‐end stage of an innovation process: the ideation phase in a virtual idea generation environment, in which fruitful and fresh ideas that are based on customers' needs are sought for in order to support the innovation process.

A constructive research approach is applied in this study. Central theoretical building blocks are provided by the extended SECI model as presented by Uotila, Melkas and Harmaakorpi, Amabile's componential theory of creativity and Burt's and Granovetter's arguments regarding structural holes and weak ties.

Based on the evaluation, it can be argued that the open innovation model and particularly the inclusion of external information and knowledge from potential service users generated, despite some shortcomings, new insights and added to the value of the development process.

The paper proposes a model that can be utilized in facilitating the novelty value of presented ideas in the front end of the innovation process and also critically discusses the challenges of the applied model, especially from the point of view of the brokering function needed during the process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a possible way for service providers to learn from their customers' experiences and bridge gaps between their and their customers' perspectives. The research question is as follows: how can users' experiences be transformed through research‐based theatre, in particular Forum Theatre, into a utilizable format in the front‐end of interpretative, user‐driven service innovation in public health care organisations?

Research‐based theatre (RBT) is introduced in the study as both an artistic intervention technique – aiming to develop public health care services – and as a qualitative research method for interpretative user‐driven innovation processes.

The study provides a path for the application of Forum Theatre in interpretative user‐driven innovation and highlights the role of “the Joker” as a host of the interpretation.

Further studies could be based on international longitudinal participatory research and combine qualitative and quantitative research methods.

The study contributes to the discussion on the potential of innovation triggered in practical contexts. The potential itself seems to be relatively widely understood, but practical measures to exploit it still seem to be missing to a great extent. This study provides an example of a Finnish application of RBT as it explores the role of Forum Theatre as a sensemaking process in a fuzzy front‐end of innovation.

The study improves the understanding of the implementation of artistic interventions within a user‐driven service innovation in public health care services.

The purpose of this study is to examine the ongoing dynamics of the public service sector reform through an embedding process of a municipal enterprise from the field of basic social and health care services – a pilot model in Finland.

The framework of a multi‐level perspective on transitions is used to describe the change process. At the lowest level of this perspective are the experimental niches acting as “seeds of change” represented by the case organisation, a municipal enterprise operating in the basic social and health care sector. The data consist of 16 thematic interviews with the key persons of the operating system, analysed with the principles of content analysis.

The examination uncovers diverse pressures affecting niche level innovations and manifesting as clashes and controversies between old and new ways of thinking, but these clashes can also act as a platform for innovations when opened up, analysed and facilitated.

Clashes that appear in societal transition processes and regime changes, both in the regimes and also on the organisational level, should not be seen solely as bottlenecks, because they can act as innovation potential when opened up and facilitated. This implies the need for not only new technological, service‐related and organisational innovations in the public sector reform, but also innovative practices, “second level innovations”.

This paper contributes to the discussion on the ongoing change processes in the reform of the social and health care sector, emphasising emerging clashes not only as obstacles but opportunities.