Case 1 Innovation and Quality Management 13-09-2022
What is an innovation?
Innovation can refer to an outcome and it can refer to the process by which outcomes are
developed. It involves the act of turning an idea or invention into something that can be sold
to costumers or somehow made practical use of. Innovation has both a creative dimension
(invention) and a commercial or practical dimension.
Healthcare innovation can be defined as the introduction of a new concept, idea, service or
product aimed at improving treatment, diagnosis, education, outreach, prevention and
resources, and with the long term goals of improving quality, safety, outcomes, efficiency
and costs.
Key points:
- New ideas (a new product, process or service, or a whole new business model)
- Exploitation (must be implementable and potentially value generating)
- Succesful (adopted by target audience)
- New (relative term, new to the world, market or organization)
Three stages of innovation:
1. invention phase (where the idea is formed) -> often emphasized in analysis
2. commercialization (technological to economical)
3. adoption phase (implementation to application) -> crucial because invention cannot
affect health unless it is used, but often problematic in practice
, Different types of innovations
We can classify innovation in three ways (Barlow, 2017). Their scope, their form or
application and their innovativeness.
Their scope.
How new is new? The perspective in innovation is often that of the adopter. Novelty is seen
in relation to the perception of adopters, whether they are:
- New to the world
- New to market
- New to organization
- New to individual adopter
Their form or application
- Products (tangible physical objects that are acquired and used by consumers)
- Services (intangible things where the consumer benefits from the service but does
not acquire an object)
- Processes (equipment, methods, systems used by producers of products or services)
Their innovativeness
- The amount of change compared to the current form
o The amount of R&D, design or engineering effort that has gone into its
creation
o The amount of time it took to develop the innovation
The model of Henderson and Clark
- Based on the innovativeness four types of innovations can be distinguished
o Incremental (adding components to existing design) (improved MRI scanner)
o Modular (using existing system architecture but employs new components
with a different design concept) (3D printed heart valve)
o Architectural (components and associated design concepts essentially
unchanged but configuration of the system changes) (providing specialized
care in a community setting)