The Innovation Journal 

About: The Innovation Journal is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Public sector & Government. It has an ISSN identifier of 1715-3816. Over the lifetime, 202 publications have been published receiving 3445 citations.

Innovation in Healthcare Delivery Systems: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract: The healthcare industry has experienced a proliferation of innovations aimed at enhancing life expectancy, quality of life, diagnostic and treatment options, as well as the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the healthcare system. Information technology has played a vital role in the innovation of healthcare systems. Despite the surge in innovation, theoretical research on the art and science of healthcare innovation has been limited. One of the driving forces in research is a conceptual framework that provides researchers with the foundation upon which their studies are built. This paper begins with a definition of healthcare innovation and an understanding of how innovation occurs in healthcare. A conceptual framework is then developed which articulates the intervening variables that drive innovation in healthcare. Based on the proposed definition of healthcare innovation, the dimensions of healthcare innovation, the process of healthcare innovation and the conceptual framework, this paper opens the door for researchers to address several questions regarding innovation in healthcare. If the concept of healthcare innovation can be clarified, then it may become easier for health policymakers and practitioners to evaluate, adopt and procure services in ways that realistically recognize, encourage and give priority to truly valuable healthcare innovations. Lastly, this paper presents 10 research questions that are pertinent to the field of healthcare innovation. It is believed that the answers to these and other such questions will hold the key to future advances in healthcare innovation research.

Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education

Abstract: Henry A. Giroux Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 20143Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyI was a little disappointed by Henry A. Giroux's most recent book, and I heartily recommend it.Let me explain.Henry A. Giroux is a working-class kid from the United States of America. He got into college on a basketball scholarship. He is probably the most prolific author among those educators that align themselves with what's called "critical pedagogy." He could justifiably claim the mantle of Paulo Freire. He holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. His curriculum vitae could pass for a small town's telephone book. He is 70-years-old. He looks more than half but not quite three-quarters of his age. He looks like he'd still make a formidable point guard. He still has the spirit of a working- class kid from the United States of America.Giroux has plenty of detractors. He has the air of a self-promoter. He can be admired for his stage presence in any of the many performances he gives as a certified "public intellectual," but his critics might label his performances no more than a few hyperbolic shorts of demagoguery. He can also be very, very funny.Education is not the objective pursuit and dissemination of value-free knowledge and it is certainly not or (rather ought not to be) an anaesthetizing and depoliticizing process in which marketable "skill sets" are dispensed to uncritical student "customers."Most obviously, Henry A. Giroux can be dismissed as an "ideologue." I know a number of educational administrators who would do and have done everything they could to squelch an invitation for him to speak on campus. They are afraid of him. Worse, I know an enormous number of educational administrators who have never even heard of him-a testament only to the vast gap between them and anything important going on in education and the academic world.I have been privileged to share some air with him at a number of public lectures and I have had the opportunity to speak with him briefly on occasion. He would not, I think, publicly or privately reject the labels that others attempt to stick on him. It's not worth the trouble. He is, by choice, a very busy man. He will talk to any audience worth his time-at professional conferences, faculty meetings, trade union gatherings or any others with a spark of life and a sense of outrage. When he does talk, they will leave well served and all the better for the experience. He is political and he is political for the very reason that he can't help it. None of us can.Giroux has no interest in creating a certified population of supine citizens, compliant consumers and efficient producers. He presses for critical education that is intended to emancipate people from the ideological constraints...From Henry Giroux's perspective, education from pre-school to post-graduate studies is under attack. It is being eviscerated by the same forces that dominate the toxic wasteland of popular entertainment, the "school-to-prison pipeline" that siphons off discontent in the racialized urban American centres, that conduct perpetual foreign wars and that ruthlessly exploit people regardless of age, gender and colour.It is one of Henry Giroux's mantras that education is not the objective pursuit and dissemination of value-free knowledge and it is certainly not or (rather ought not to be) an anaesthetizing and depoliticizing process in which marketable "skill sets" are dispensed to uncritical student "customers" who are desperate to find employment in postmodern economies where satisfying, secure and well-paying jobs are quickly disappearing where they have not already vanished.In the alternative, Giroux believes that the educational project is many things, but it is at least this: regardless of whether students are studying architecture or zoology, engineering, economics, ethics or English literature, there is always a moral and a political essence to the enterprise. …

From NASA to EU: the evolution of the TRL scale in Public Sector Innovation

Abstract: IntroductionThis article explains how the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) scale became, through various mutations, an official innovation policy tool of the European Union (EU). TRL originated at the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where it began as a means of measuring how far a technology was from being deployed in space. Later, since 1999, as an outcome of a US Government investigation, the US Department of Defense (DoD) was required to use TRL in weapons technology acquisition (Schinasi, et al., 1999). Similarly, the Commonwealth of Australia conducted the Kinnaird Defense Procurement Review (Kinnaird, et al., 2003) and started using TRL in its own DoD. Around that time, the usage of TRL spread among other governmental and military organizations in English-speaking countries and was also adopted by the European Space Agency. A glossary of terms is provided in Appendix I.From the very beginning, TRL was used to define boundaries between different organizational and financial modes of technological development. Perhaps this is why it made sense to the High-Level Expert Group on Key Enabling Technologies (HLG-KET) of the European Union to build TRL into the foundation of its new public innovation policy. The universal usage of TRL in EU policy was proposed in the final report of the first HLG-KET (HLG-KET, 2011), and it was indeed implemented in the subsequent EU framework program, called H2020, running from 2013 to 2020. This means not only space and weapons programs, but everything from nanotechnology to informatics and communication technology.Central ArgumentThis article argues that it has never been established whether the originally space and weapons technology-specific TRL scale can be used fruitfully in all areas of innovation. Because of this, the EU-wide mandate to use TRL across all publicly funded programs is a risky innovation of the innovation policy itself. This article argues that the subtle mutations happened to the TRL concept in the last three decades. Many aspects of the TRL scale were lost, forgotten or abstracted away during its journey to the EU, while in the meantime; new meanings and associations were formed. In the absence of discipline-specific guides, TRLs will predictably become a source of confusion and a subject of abuse in efforts to obtain EU funding.Article Organization and MethodologyThe article first covers the evolution of TRL from its beginning at NASA to 2013 when it became both an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard and a de facto standard within space and weapons industry. The aim of this first section is to see through the often one-sided laudation of TRL and find the actual, rather hidden factors and conditions that made it widely accepted. The method of this part is the historical analysis of policy documents, program descriptions and other sources.The hidden factors uncovered in the first section facilitate the evaluation of the TRL usage in EU public sector innovation context. This section covers the developments from the first HLG-KET report (HLG-KET, 2011), presents how the H2020 program attempts to implement the TRL scale and ends in 2015 when the final report of the second EU HLG-KET report was written (HLG-KET, 2015). The focus of this description is on the mutations of the practices of using TRL for decision making.These first two sections provide the necessary background to the discussion of the opportunities and risks of TRL bring to the EU in the third section.LimitationsThis article is based on publicly available sources only. There might have been various reasons behind the adoption of the TRL scale in the EU in addition to those revealed in these public documents. Therefore, some issues presented herein may have been caused by the simple lack of communication and not necessarily a lack of clear strategy making. Then again, the majority of those who will have to adopt the TRL scale in order to participate in EU programs have no choice but to rely on public documents. …

Introduction: Collaborative innovation in the public sector

Abstract: This special issue focuses on collaborative innovation in the public sector (Bommert, 2010; Sorensen and Torfing, 2011). It aims to explore how networks, partnerships and other forms of interaction between relevant and affected actors can accommodate the development and implementation of new and bold ideas in ways that reinvigorate public policies and services (Eggers and Singh, 2009). There has been a growing interest in public innovation (Newman, Raine and Skelcher, 2001; Borins, 2008; Hartley, 2005) and there is a burgeoning literature on the role of interactive forms of governance such as partnerships and networks (Kickert, Klijn and Koppenjan, 1997; Rhodes, 1997; Sorensen and Torfing, 2007). However, so far there have been few attempts to relate these fields of interests and bodies of literature by analyzing how interactive arenas can facilitate multi-actor collaboration that in turn may foster innovation by bringing together public and private actors with relevant innovation assets, facilitating knowledge sharing and transformative learning, and building joint ownership to new innovative visions and practices.In order to compensate this benign neglect this issue of The Innovation Journal endeavors to investigate when and how multi-actor collaboration can enhance public innovation. In this brief introduction we shall first look at the main differences between private and public innovation and the mounting interest in public innovation before presenting the argument in favor of collaborative innovation as a key driver of policy development and service improvement. Since the role and impact of collaborative innovation is determined by political-institutional macro-conditions as well as a number of micro-interventions, the Introduction concludes a discussion of the significance of the transition from Old Public Administration, via New Public Management, to New Public Governance and the importance of new forms of innovation management.Innovation in the private and public sectorIt is common knowledge that innovation is the key to success for private businesses (Schumpeter, 1934, 1946). Innovation helps private companies to cut costs, improve their products and open new markets. Failure to innovate is often fatal as private firms will gradually loose their competitive edge and face shrinking market shares and profits, before they eventually close down. The widespread recognition of the need for innovation in private companies means that large private enterprises create large R&D departments or use crowd-sourcing to get new ideas. Small and medium size companies form strategic alliances with each other and public knowledge producers and try to copy the products and practices of the larger and more innovative firms in order to maintain their competitive position.When it comes to the public sector there is a lot of skepticism with regard to the capacity for innovating public policies, organizations and services. Many people, and especially a good deal of those employed in the private sector, consider the public sector as a slow-moving bureaucracy characterized by red tape, inertia and stalemate. Indeed, pointing out the lack of dynamism and adaptive change in the public sector was a key part of the neo-liberalist bashing of the public sector in the 1980s.The critical evaluation of the innovative capacity of the public sector is not completely misguided. Max Weber (1968 [1922]) clearly sees stability as the primary objective of public bureaucracy, and we can hardly deny that the thick layer of formal rules, the multi-layered hierarchies, the organizational silos, the lack of economic incentives and the divided political leadership in the top of public bureaucracies tend to stifle public innovation (Halvorsen et al., 2005). In addition, it has been argued that with the growth of public bureaucracies most of their resources are used to provide internal coordination and fight external border wars with other public bureaucracies (Downs, 1967). …

Stewards, Mediators, and Catalysts: Toward a Model of Collaborative Leadership1

Abstract: Leadership is widely recognized as an important ingredient in successful collaboration. Collaborative leaders typically play a facilitative role, encouraging and enabling stakeholders to work together effectively. Building on the existing literature on collaborative governance and interviews with leaders of U.S. Workforce Investment Boards, we identify three facilitative roles for collaborative leaders. Stewards facilitate collaboration by helping to convene collaboration and maintain its integrity. Mediators facilitate collaboration by managing conflict and arbitrating exchange between stakeholders. Catalysts facilitate collaboration by helping to identify and realize value-creating opportunities. Although collaborative leaders are called upon to play multiple roles, the salience of these roles may vary with the circumstances and goals of collaboration. In situations of high conflict and low trust, for example, collaborative leaders may be called upon to emphasize steward and mediator roles. In situations where creative problem-solving is the primary goal, the catalyst role may become much more central. Distinguishing these three collaborative leadership roles is an important step toward building a contingency model of collaborative leadership.Keywords: collaboration, collaborative governance, stakeholder, contingency, leadership, workforce development.IntroductionIn 1998, President Clinton signed into law the Workforce Investment Act (WIA). Much like the welfare reform, enacted only two years earlier, WIA promised to revolutionize the work of workforce development. Although the federal government had long been a supplier of workforce training programs under programs enacted through the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) or the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), these programs offered a patchwork approach to job training. According to former Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, these programs were -never fully brought into alignment with other components of the system'. Consequently, federally funded job training programs were largely scattered - offering clients limited access to services, career advice, quality job information data, and skills training.2 It was hoped that through coordination and co-location at the servicedelivery level (e.g., one stop shops), consumers would have easier access to every element of the workforce development system, from simple job searches to receiving advice on career planning, to enrolling in basic more advanced skills training. However, coordination of service delivery was only one of the problems plaguing an increasingly dysfunctional workforce system, so policymakers also mandated a more comprehensive strategy of collaboration. The WIA placed control of each local workforce area (established by governors) in Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs), which would be jointly governed by labor unions, community colleges, training providers, locally elected officials, industry leaders, and social service providers. These stakeholders were to develop collaborative strategies to create a more effective workforce system.Despite this mandated collaborative framework, large variations developed in the degree, scope, type, and breadth of collaboration among workforce development areas. Some workforce development areas practiced pro forma collaborative governance - presenting only enough of a veneer of collaboration to please local and federal officials. Others surpassed this by implementing micro-collaboratives- supplementing the WIB's governance with smaller project-based forms of collaborative governance. A small but growing number of WIBs engaged in more extensive collaborative governance. In each of these cases, leaders played a critical role in shaping the depth and extent of WIB collaboration. Leaders of the most collaborative WIBs, for example, have begun to reassess what one referred to as the little fiefdoms' established by governors under WIA - workforce areas established along political rather than economic lines. …