Innovation in hospitals: piloting a tool for investigating contributions of hospital employees to innovation

This paper addresses the question of how hospital employees contribute to the generation of innovations and to what extent hospitals function as a conducive environment for innovative work. The motivation behind this exploratory study was primarily to identify the diversity of innovation activities in hospitals, with the goal of developing and testing a survey tool that can adequately capture this diversity. Although conceptual and empirical research on the characteristics of medical and health related innovations has been carried out, the role of hospitals in such innovations is more often assumed rather than empirically tested. We argue that innovation in public hospitals is still not well understood and contribute to understanding through a pilot study carried out in four public hospitals in Norway. A preliminary analysis indicates that there are different modes of innovative work in hospitals, as suggested by some of the literature, and that different kinds of employees are involved in distinct sets of activities. The survey tool that we developed seems to be able to capture the diversity of innovation-related activities, but there were problematic aspects related to the sampling and recruitment of respondents. Suggestions for further exploration and testing are discussed.