Managing For Innovation

Innovation means making meaningful change to improve an organization’s services, programs, processes, operations, health care delivery model, and business model to create new value for the organization’s stakeholders. Innovation should lead your organization to new dimensions of performance. Innovation is no longer strictly the purview of health care researchers; innovation is important for all aspects of your operations and all work systems and work processes. For example, innovation can address care bundles and practice guidelines, facility design, patient safety, the administration of medications, the organization of work, interoperable information infrastructure, dissemination of best practices, or alternative therapies. Organizations should be led and managed so that innovation becomes part of the learning culture. Innovation should be integrated into daily work and should be supported by your performance improvement system. Systematic processes for innovation should reach across your entire organization.