Exploring Digital Innovation Paths in Healthcare: The Case of a Large Swedish Healthcare Organization

Abstract

Digital innovation has been advocated as bringing new opportunities to organizations. At the same time, here is still a gap of empirical research on the paths, i.e., choices in directions manifested over time, of digital innovation in public sector healthcare. In this study, we aim to fill this gap through analyzing a complete set of three years of centrally funded innovation projects in a large incumbent healthcare organization. Using a previously proposed framework combining the Resource Based View and Organizational Ambidexterity into a positioning of digital innovation opportunity, we investigate the paths of digital innovation. The findings show that the predominant path of digital innovation lies in exploitative innovation through utilizing internal and shared resources. In contrast with the literature the use of complementary assets in the form of external resources i.e., engaging customers and other external parties in value creation, is only found in one of the projects. We describe this as a case of path dependency, where the organization avoids tapping into some of the core opportunities in digital innovation. This is discussed in relation to the digital innovation literature and the future paths of digital innovation in public sector healthcare.