Promoting and Embedding Innovation

Key success factors
Evidence about the individual, organisational
and environmental determinants of innovation
adoption and spread provides guidance for
NHS organisations wanting to enhance uptake
and diffusion.
The work of the NHS Modernisation
Agency between 2001 and 2005
contains a number of relevant lessons.
The NHS Modernisation Agency found
sustaining and spreading innovations a
key challenge, particularly those
involving changes to service delivery
(Buchanan, Fitzgerald and Ketley
2007). In addressing these challenges,
it is clear that innovations in service
delivery can rarely if ever be copied.
Rather, they must be adapted and
customised to fit differences in
organisational contexts and variations
in receptiveness to new ways of
working. A number of factors influence
the uptake of innovations in service
delivery, including leadership by chief
executives and senior managers,
clinical engagement and ownership of
new ways of working, training and
development to support changes in
practice, the time and resources
available to implement innovations, and
alignment with performance
management and incentive systems.
The work of the NHS Modernisation
Agency shows that some innovations
were taken up and spread rapidly – the
„see and treat‟ programme in hospital
A&E departments is an example – but
in most cases there were variations in
both the speed and depth of uptake.
The complexity of organisational
change in healthcare means there are
no magic bullets or shortcuts in
improving the uptake of innovations in
the NHS.
Although a clear message from this review is
that there is no magic formula for
institutionalising innovation, a number of
factors emerge as consistent tenets of good
practice. These can be expressed as a series
of broad recommendations:
Create avenues for identifying innovations:
The review identified a number of channels
and resources available to local organisations
and stakeholders seeking to innovate. The
evidence suggests that the further nurturing of
individuals who seek out innovations
(alongside more established corporate
research and development) is important to the
ongoing identification of new ways of working.
This will require the allocation of slack
resources to identify and trial new practices.
Healthcare organisations can discover
potentially beneficial interventions by, amongst
other things:
o
o
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putting in place a formal system for
searching the relevant scientific,
organisational and management literature
joining broader networks to learn about
good practice elsewhere
nurturing in-house innovators – this
requires commitment of slack resources
to innovative individuals as well as
tolerance of innovator unorthodoxy
Engage with theories of change:
A common mistake identified in the review is
the tendency for interventions to be introduced
without any overarching conception of how
they will be diffused and how they will bring
about intended benefits. It is important that
learning and insight into how change and
transformation are brought about are applied
to local strategy and practice.
37 Learning from experience