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Explores recent approaches to international best practices and how they relate to context and innovation in health services.

Critical review of existing research on best practices and how they created, diffused, and translate in the international setting.

Best practices are widely used and discussed, but processes by which they are developed and diffused across international settings are not well understood.

Further research is needed on innovation and dissemination of best practices internationally.

This commentary points out directions for future research on innovation and diffusion of best practices, particularly in the international setting.

Features two case studies. The first of these focuses on Royal Mail, provider of a universal delivery service within the UK. Notes how total quality management has evolved within the organization and how the role of internal good practice has underpinned the development of a continuous improvement environment. Identifies the key enablers for the effective transfer of good practice and the process models adopted. The second case study focuses on Texas Instruments Europe, part of the TI Group and a previous winner of the European Foundation for Quality Management Award. Investigates how different sources provide an extensive database of knowledge for the organization wishing to locate best practices. Identifies the approach adopted to best practice sharing in order to remain focused and achieve maximum benefits within the shortest timeframe. The organization has set up its own office of best practice (OBP) to support the best practice drive and the article focuses on how the OBP expertise is deployed to maximum effect within the organization.

A recognition that pockets of business and process excellence existed alongside mediocrity led Texas Instruments to establish a Best Practice Sharing programme under the direction of the Office of Best Practices. The Office of Best Practices, launched in 1994, is a dedicated unit which helps Texas Instruments’ worldwide businesses to identify, access and transfer best practices. TI’s Best Practice Sharing initiative was implemented to provide a mechanism for dialogue between TI leadership and TI employees and to facilitate collaboration based on the company’s strengths and business gaps. The goal is to provide a quicker path to achieving business excellence. In addition to providing these solutions, the Best Practice Sharing project has provided TI employees with a greater sense of the synergies possible across the company and a greater feeling of shared vision. This paper reviews the TI‐BEST programme, the Best Practice Sharing initiative, and examines the lessons learnt and benefits gained from best practices knowledge sharing.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether there are some existing widespread and common models and definitions for organizational change best practice in the literature.

This paper builds on previous research to define a model of evidence‐based change management base practice. A structured literature review is used to search for contemporary models and definitions of organizational change best practice.

No consistent definitions of organizational change best practice are to be found in the literature.

The paper provides a snapshot of the current literature on organizational change best practice. Implications of the findings on organizational change best practice are discussed and further research suggested.

The present study was undertaken to identify what practices are considered best business practices by business firms in Sri Lanka and to explore whether there exist different practices in different sectors.

Data were collected from managers attending postgraduate and mid‐career development programs in a large Sri Lankan university. A total of 71 managers responded to the questionnaire representing 71 firms. The data were analyzed with principal component factor (Varimax rotation) technique to identify the best practices and Tukey's post hoc test was employed to compare them across different sectors.

The findings indicate that the following are considered to be best business practices in Sri Lanka: a bias for action, quality focus, customer orientation, relationships with customers, relationships with employees and outsourcing. These best practices belong to four key performance areas, namely external market orientation, internal organizational process, current business performance, and internal customer orientation. It was also found that medium‐sized firms are different from large, and service firms are different from firms in the trade sector in terms of a bias for action. Further, firms operating in the overseas markets and manufacturing firms are significantly higher in “quality focus” than their counterparts.

The researchers suggest that future research be undertaken using large samples, taking the four‐dimensional framework as the conceptual framework.

Though the history of best business practices runs into the early 1980s, empirical studies on the topic are limited both in the West and the East. During the last two decades a number of lists of best practices appeared with little empirical support, thus causing a research gap.

The purpose of this study is to analyze reported good institutional responsible research and innovation (RRI) practices from an organizational and learning perspective to discuss the usefulness of RRI as a broad umbrella concept.

This study connects neo-institutional and translation accounts of diffusion to different modes of learning and discusses reported best practices from 12 reports, including in total 23 organizations in the research system worldwide, in light of this theoretical framework. This study categorizes the good practices identified in the reports and discusses how the nature of the practices influences the potential learning from them. The authors then apply the results from the discussion of this study to current policy developments on RRI.

The two most often mentioned good practices overall are organizational policies and the establishment of organizational units, but the type of good practices recommended differs across the various aspects of the RRI umbrella concept. This diversity within the RRI construct is a practical argument against the effectiveness of RRI as an umbrella concept.

This study is novel in the fact that the authors, building on Wæraas (2020), systematically relate types of good practice to neo-institutional theory and translation perspectives explicitly combined with learning approaches and apply this approach in the field of research organizations. The policy implications from the empirical and theoretical analyses are novel and timely in these early phases of the EU funding framework programme Horizon Europe and can also be relevant for the increasingly important umbrella concept of Open Science.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of best management practices in an Australian state-run healthcare system, namely New South Wales (NSW), and studies the impact of a range of hospital factors in driving best management practices as a means of enhancing healthcare delivery.

This study adapts a unique survey instrument globally tested to quantify the multi-dimensional nature of hospital management practices in 42 acute care public hospitals of NSW. The authors then analysed the role of hospital-specific characteristics in driving best management practices, namely hospital size (measured by the number of hospital beds, employees and doctors), level of skill and education, degree of hospital manager autonomy and organisational hierarchy.

The findings of this study show the areas of strength and potential areas of improvement in NSW hospitals. The authors find a positive association between the adoption of better management practices and hospital size (measured by the number of hospital beds and employees), level of skills and education, degree of hospital manager autonomy and organisational hierarchy. However, hospital size as measured by the number of doctors did not have a statistically significant relationship.

This paper is of interest to both hospital administrators, clinical doctors and healthcare policy-makers who want to improve and develop strategies for better management in the healthcare sector.

This study provides an internationally comparable robust measure of management capability in public hospitals, and contributes to the evidence-base of management practices and performance in hospitals.

Sharing information security best practices between experts via knowledge management systems is valuable for improving information security practices, exchanging expertise, mitigating security risks, spreading knowledge, reducing costs and saving efforts. The purpose of this paper is developing a conceptual model to enhance the transfer of information security best practices between professionals in virtual communities through a Web-based knowledge management system to exchange their successful experience in handling different information security situations.

The model is validated by surveying 17 experts’ reviews on the correctness of the model’s structure and its related components through applying deep rich peer debriefing to test suitability. Quantitative data has been collected to achieve confirmatory results.

The resulting model incorporates five main components that support the formal mechanism for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge: identification, classification, storage, validation and sharing. The success of knowledge sharing is highly dependent on the active collaboration of community members and highly influenced by motivation. Validating transferred knowledge is vital for ensuring the credibility of the system.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is one of the first to highlight the role of integrating knowledge management to enhance the effective share and reuse of information security best practices knowledge. The research results can support researchers investigating the topic and generate trustworthy literature to guide information security virtual community developers.

Examines the role and influence of management systems, practices and behaviour in successful manufacturing strategy, based on the development of manufacturing strategy into a comprehensive concept which contains three paradigms: manufacturing as a source of competitive advantage, that the choices of manufacturing processes and other related characteristics are contingent on one another, and there is a relationship between best practice and performance. The study employed a survey of 46 Japanese factories in the machinery, electronics and automotive industries, with 26 people in each factory. The factories were examined on how closely they used “best practices” management. In addition, factor analysis, cluster analysis, t‐tests on differences between the groups and correlations among clusters, practices and performance were conducted. The results supported the study’s three hypotheses: factories report different levels of use of the best practices; best practices are linked into certain sets of practices; and the use of best practices is related to performance. The discussion and conclusions address these findings and are used to offer support for Voss’s recent claim that manufacturing strategy should be considered “a continuous loop” among the three paradigms of manufacturing strategy.

The paper aims to provide guidelines of companies in identifying their best practices with reference to a French example.

The paper describes first the evolution of benchmarking, which nowadays is more and more based on the identification of good practices to acquire or transfer. Then we present a typology of best practices which can help a company to discern more effectively what could be relevant to exchange in benchmarking. Finally, we describe the best practice specification (BPS) method, which helps a company to locate and specify its good practices likely to be transferred within the framework of benchmarking.

The paper underlines the difficulty of a company to clearly define what a “best practice” is and the lack of methods which could help it to identify its best practices.

Future research will be to develop a method of acquisition and representation of the best practices. In particular, it will be a question of studying if certain models that are currently proposed to represent knowledge (GAMETH, KADS, MKSM, MEREX, …) can be used for the acquisition and the formalization of these best practices.

The BPS method is presently applied in TECUMSEH Europe on its Cessieu site (France). The company is identifying the best practices currently put into place by the various sectors of manufacturing of the site on the process “To deploy progress effort (SPC and TPM)”. The long term objective of the company is to apply these practices in all of the manufacturing sectors of the site, as well as on those other three sites in the group.

This paper offers practical help to a company to identify and characterize its best practices.