Hacking Health: Building a Community of Innovation Through Events

Innovation lies at the intersection of different worlds, at the conjunction of foreign universes. The recombination of ideas and knowledge is the driving force of innovation (Ahuja and Lampert, 2001), be it within organizations or outside their boundaries. To produce new forms of innovation, this recombination process requires organizations to open up to new ideas and knowledge outside their normal scope while growing the capability to integrate them and make them fit their reality (Kaplan and Vakili, 2015). However, organizations’ core resources and capabilities orient their activities and innovation inquiries (Coombs and Hull, 1998). This creates a paradigm, a set vision of the world, a sort of adherence to particular paths that hinders their ability to identify, assess and build on external ideas. It also hinders their ability to see and tap into rich sources of ideas and contributions, creative pockets that could otherwise bring them tremendous value (Carlile, 2002). Such creative pockets, bursting with valuable perspectives, initiatives and resources, thus remain untapped or even undiscovered, being too distributed, unstructured and always outside the confines of the organizations that could engage with them, bring them to life and bring them to market (Cohendet et al., 2010)…