Innovation in healthcare settings: The power of everyday practices

Abstract

In this chapter we concentrate on an innovation process focused on encouraging greater coordination across a network of organizations, each involved in the care of children with complex care needs. Planning and executing an innovation change project in a network setting is particularly challenging because there are no (formal) hierarchical relationships that can be used to impose the change. Moreover, from a theoretical perspective, the traditional change literature that focuses on planning by a senior management team has been criticized for not portraying what actually happens in practice, even in a hierarchical setting. In this paper, therefore, we adopt a strategy-as-practice (SAP) lens to examine the everyday practices of all the stakeholders who are involved in identifying an opportunity for innovation and then actually making this happen over an extended period of time. In doing this, we demonstrate and explore the power of everyday practices associated with talk, text and things that can mobilize knowledge in ways that move the innovation effort forward and make it durable. This practice view of power provides very different insights into what allows such innovation to happen when compared to the resource view of power that assumes this depends on the resources that can be mustered by individuals ‘in charge’.