The Nonspread of Innovations: the Mediating Role of Professionals

By Ewan Ferlie, L. Fitzgerald, Martin Wood, Chris Hawkins. 2005

1,082 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Two qualitative studies in the U.K. health care sector trace eight purposefully selected innovations. Complex, contested, and nonlinear innovation careers emerged. Developing the nonlinear perspective on innovation spread further, we theorize that multi-professionalization shapes "nonspread." Social and cognitive boundaries between different professions retard spread, as individual professionals operate within unidisciplinary communities of practice. This new theory helps explain barriers to the spread of innovation in multiprofessional organizations in both health care and other settings.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c51e3d2c6b40cdb0b0cb0cb0644572bb5012707c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Citations in the corpus

How do business model and health technology design influence each other? Insights from a longitudinal case study of three academic spin-offs (2014, methodology): “Applying a “constant comparative” method of analysis (Gibbert and Ruigrok, 2010), our team actively searched for evidence that would contradict our emerging analytical insights (Ferlie et al., 2005).”
The economics of COVID-19: initial empirical evidence on how family firms in five European countries cope with the corona crisis (2020, background): “Both deductive and inductive (Denis et al., 2001; Ferlie et al., 2005; Pajunen, 2006), this approachbetween theory testing and theorygeneration is in the tradition of “theory elaboration” as coined by Lee et al.”
Implementation science: What is it and why should i care? (2020, neutral): “(Ferlie et al., 2005) Thus, the problem of non-uptake of effective clinical innovations is longstanding and persistent—and likely the rule rather than the exception.”
Reconfiguring Boundary Relations: Robotic Innovations in Pharmacy Work (2012, background): “In multi-occupational settings such as healthcare organizations, these strains may be exacerbated as cognitive, social, and political boundaries among groups inhibit the spread of innovations (Ferlie et al. 2005).”
Collaborative innovation: A Viable Alternative to Market Competition and Organizational Entrepreneurship (2013, background): “Nevertheless, the presence of strong professions in the public sector may also act as a barrier to innovation (Ferlie et al. 2005).”
Shaping tasks and relationships at work: Examining the antecedents and consequences of employee job crafting (2007, background): “…employing one main occupational group (e.g., in the case of schools -- teachers), there are often subgroups or specialties (Halpern, 1992; Ferlie et al., 2005) that develop their own occupational communities of practice (e.g., regular education teachers versus special education teachers).”
Innovation-Oriented Culture in the Public Sector: Do managerial autonomy and result control lead to innovation? (2014, background): “A second potential explanation is the role of professionals in the (non)-diffusion of innovation (Ferlie et al., 2005).”
Value creation in the quadruple helix: a micro level conceptual model of principal investigators as value creators (2018, positive): “However, when boundaries between roles become too strong, they can inhibit knowledge sharing and value creation (Ferlie et al., 2005; Hsiao et al., 2012).”