Corporate Venturing and Customer-Driven Innovation in the Mental Health-Care Market: a Review of the Literature and Development of a Conceptual Framework

Abstract

In the highly competitive health-care market, corporations need to develop successful new outcomes that meet the needs of the customers. However, little has been written about how new health services are developed and to what extent should patients be involved in the development process. What is more, no in-depth research has been made about how health-care organisations choose to exploit the entrepreneurial opportunities that emerge from the development of patient-oriented services. The purpose of this article is to provide a conceptual framework with which to examine how new service development contributes to corporate entrepreneurship activities. The paper reviews the literature and develops a framework that can be used to identify, firstly, how and to what extent patients should participate in their therapy in order the firm to develop new services that satisfy their needs profitably. Secondly, to investigate how these new services could be the competitive advantage of the company to further expansion, investing, and establishing new mental health hospitals in other geographic regions. This framework aims to provide a new insight into the identification of entrepreneurial opportunities through customer-oriented new service development in a more integrated and systematic way than has been implemented in the past.