Designing cross-sector collaboration to foster technological innovation: Empirical insights from eHealth partnerships in five countries

Abstract

This article examines the impact of partnership design on technological innovation in public-private innovation partnerships. It develops two competing hypotheses on how specific partnership characteristics lead to innovation in health care services. The study compares 19 eHealth partnerships across five European countries and uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to test the hypotheses. The findings show that small, centralized, and homogeneous partnerships are most successful at achieving technological innovation. The study highlights the importance of partnership design in spurring innovation and calls for a reconsideration of some of the underlying assumptions of collaborative innovation theory.