Technology-driven Innovation Research Articles

GEDIFO: A Cross-Organizational Approach to Learning in Communities of Practice

In today’s globalized economy, organizations face international competition; the need for technology-driven innovation; inefficiencies due to hierarchical structures; cost-cutting; and frequently a deterioration in working conditions as a result thereof. The current paper focusses on the situation of works councils who are challenged to support the interests of employees on the one hand and to act as co-managers on the other. GEDIFO, an initiative by the Vienna Chamber of Labor and the educational body of the Austrian Trade Union, seeks to advance cross-organizational learning among works councils in communities of practice (CoP).

Taking Us There

Our Creative Nursing 2013 exploration of innovating began in Issue #1 by facing the future-how to see it in new paradigms and talk about it with a new vocabulary. Issue #2 was about our drive to create, and the cognitive processes that can take us to new places. This issue celebrates manifestations of that creativity- innovative programs that are already taking us there, and scholarly concepts that show us the way.Daniel Pesut, our guest editor for this issue, is a nursing scholar and educator who believes strongly that creativity can and must be taught in higher education of health care professionals and in organizations. His research revealed that, "through focused attention to self-monitoring, self-evaluation, and self-reinforcement, nurses can self-regulate creative thought." From the literature, he presents models of creative thinking along with "mental locks" that serve as barriers, principles of directed creativity for quality improvement efforts, best practices for leading innovation in organizations, and self-assessment tools. He advocates for viewing conflict through a lens of the complementary nature of phenomena: "Complemen- tary pairs are dynamic, and reconciling them means harmonizing and bringing together that which has previously been considered incommensurate." Dr. Pesut also reviews The Innovation Equation: Building Creativity and Risk-Taking in Your Organization by Jacqueline Byrd and Paul Lockwood Brown, which offers a model for accelerating innovative capacity.One of the most groundbreaking programs we have ever presented in Creative Nursing is Buurtzorg ("neighborhood care" in the Dutch language), a model of community care developed in the Netherlands and now being replicated internationally. A product of design thinking, Buurtzorg is a nurse-led, nurse- run organization of self-managed teams that provide home care to patients in their neighborhoods; the model is based on principles of trust, professionalism, creativity, simplicity, and collaboration. As nursing professor Karen Monsen and Buurtzorg founder Jos de Blok explain, "The organization assumes that employees will do well and can be trusted." This strong support for autonomous nursing practice is exemplified by Buurtzorg's motto: "How do you manage professionals? You don't!"Nurses who want to be innovators within the context of their health care organizations are encouraged to embrace the concept of intrapreneurship. Nurse consultant Dori Taylor Sullivan's article review on this important topic points out that the skill sets that will advance "human factors" innovation in health care (as distinct from technology-driven innovation) have their foundation in entrepre- neurial and intrapreneurial values and expertise.In another realm of recent innovation, health care consultant ChrysMarie Suby addresses the benefits of social media in health care, including the educational value of blogs, wikis, and videoconferencing, and some Boston hospitals' use of Facebook to communicate with patients, families, staff, and the public following the recent tragedy there. She also discusses the consequences of inappropriate use of social media, including risks to patient privacy and professional reputations and the lost productivity and threats to safety inherent in "presenteeism."Recognizing the developmental nature of creative thought processes in the journey from novice to expert, nursing professor Ruth Kuiper offers an innovative model, tools, and strategies for integrating clinical reasoning into nursing curricula, with a goal of students' achieving a novice level of competence in solving patient problems upon graduation and beginning practice. …

■ Rising to the Challenge of Health Care Reform With Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Nursing Initiatives Anne Wilson, Nancy Whitaker, and Deirdre Whitford. In The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 2012, Volume 17, Issue 2, Manuscript 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.3912/OJIN.Vol17No01Man05

Rising to the Challenge of Health Care Reform With Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Nursing Initiatives Anne Wilson, Nancy Whitaker, and Deirdre Whitford. In The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 2012, Volume 17, Issue 2, Manuscript 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.3912/OJIN .Vol17No01Man05The concepts of entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship have been intermittently popular because various authors explored their relevance to and use for enhancing nursing and health care practice and delivery. This article by Wilson, Whitaker, and Whitford provides an expansive global and updated view of entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship among nurses through examination of several important nursing initiatives that are having a positive influence on health care delivery within the context of health care reform.To introduce the topic, the authors state two initial key assumptions. First, health care reform is happening worldwide in response to expanding needs driven by aging of the population, increases in chronic diseases, and rising costs of health care. Second, the health care workforce must comprise the correct number and quality of roles, must have the appropriate skill mix, and must provide for full utilization of all roles to meet evolving health needs. Because nurses usually represent the largest proportion of professionals within the health care workforce, the role of nursing will be pivotal in designing and implementing innovations to enhance care, quality, and cost-effectiveness. Despite their pivotal role, nurses are often not full partners in the assessment and design of better approaches to health care services.These authors posit that the "human factors" component of health care innovation, as distinct from technology-driven innovation, will be achieved through nurses creating and fulfilling roles and functions that bridge gaps in health care across settings. The skill sets that will advance these innovations have their foundation in entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial values and expertise.Nurse entrepreneurs are defined as self-employed proprietors who are directly accountable to the clients who receive and pay for their services. To be successful, whether in providing direct care, consultation, or other activities, nurse entrepreneurs must creatively conceptualize and then offer services and/or products that are judged valuable. Nurse intrapreneurs are paid employees of health care organizations, who embrace and practice innovations skills, often to address identified needs in the patients and populations they serve. Arriving at a precise number of nurse entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs is impossible, but it is clear that they are present, their numbers are probably increasing, and they are playing crucial roles in improving health care. …

Editorial

Editorial

R&D INVESTMENT DECISION ON EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

The prosperity of emerging technology may be triggered by the occurrence of rare events, and once emerging technology booms, there may be an enormous market demand for it. This paper explores the firm's commercial and R&D investment decisions on emerging technology in real options framework. We think that, for the fear that a rare event which occurs prior to R&D success would trigger the emerging technology boom, the firm should carry out prospective R&D in the emerging technology innovation. So the impacts of the R&D hazard rate and the intensity of rare event arrival on the prospective R&D investment strategy are mainly addressed. There are two results. First, the firm is most likely to take the strategy at low, rather than high, probability of technological boom in market-driven innovation. Second, in technology-driven innovation, the huge potential profit of emerging technology in booming period can arouse more attention toward the firm. When the growth rate of profit flow in booming period rises to some degree, the firm may take this strategy unconditionally.

Alt.Art-Sci: We Need New Ways of Linking Arts and Sciences

A recent National Science Foundation–National Endowment for the Arts workshop sought to re-think the ways that the arts and sciences are being linked today and how the agencies might jointly promote emerging areas of research and cultural development. Participants included artists, scientists and research engineers, as well as university deans and directors of alternative art-science spaces. This first workshop focused on computer science and information technology; a forthcoming NSF-NEA workshop will look at the arts and the biological sciences. Next year the NSF is sponsoring an art-science workshop, “Art as a Way of Knowing,” at the San Francisco Exploratorium, which has coupled creative artists with scientists and engineers for more than 40 years. Why this new attention to the coupling of the arts and sciences? The topic has been hotly debated for at least several hundred years, ever since the Scientific Revolution. The 19th century saw prominent figures such as Goethe active in both the arts and sciences. Samuel Morse, inventor of Morse code, was a painter. In the 1920s and 1930s the Bauhaus movement recoupled the creative arts with science and industry. In the 1950s Snow’s “two cultures” debate rekindled initiatives to bridge the arts and sciences. In the 1960s, Experiments in Art and Technology joined artists such as Rauschenberg with engineers such as Billy Kluver. So what’s new? The first thing is that “born-digital”–generation artists find themselves at home in the landscape of information technologies. The NSF Creative IT program recognized this burgeoning area of research. The NEA’s Audience 2.0 highlighted the new paths—and growing audiences—for art created and distributed through the digital electronic media. It has become second nature for artists to use computers and to push the development of computers in new directions to address artistic needs. New “creative” and entertainment industries have resulted. By the end of the NSF-NEA workshop, creativity was almost a dirty word—overused and often not clearly defined. Creativity by whom and for what? What was clear was that there is a new, dynamic and rapidly evolving group of artists, scientists and engineers working together, a networked “community of practice” also coming together through a variety of “communities of interest.” Most of these creative individuals or teams work in informal settings, from nonprofit groups to the hacker, “maker” community, alternative arts centers and people’s science movements. An important issue is how to network and cross-feed these groups with more formal institutional programs. The “creativity for what?” leitmotif reflected a concern that technology-driven innovation needs to be contextualized by social and cultural issues, such as urban renewal, climate change and energy sustainability or the technological transformation of health issues. Our Town, the proposed NEA program for the arts and urban redevelopment, perhaps provides one example context that could motivate new art-science agendas. Many burning issues in our lives and communities give us no choice but to link the arts and sciences. Another thread was the need to innovate in creativity thinking itself when faced with the big data flood, distributed networked knowledge and the impact of digital culture on how the arts and sciences are embedded in society. The recent Macarthur report “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age” and the National Research Council’s “Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity” provide good starting points. The “partitions and divisions” within funding institutions and universities seem mal-adapted to the rapidly changing locus of multi-, interand trans-disciplinary artistic practice, and more particularly the rapidly changing landscape of art-science collaboration. The phrase “Alt.Art-Sci” emerged a number of times during the discussions as a way of capturing the uneasy sense that “business-as-usual” approaches will miss the mark. We need to innovate in innovation to work in the emerging networked culture. We need to look at where the most exciting creativity is occurring, at the burning issues in our communities and at how harnessing new couplings of science, engineering and cultural approaches can be part of creating a sustainable society.

Reconsidering the role of brainstorming in the marketing of technology-driven innovation

Establishing a perfect link between technology-driven innovation and user needs exploration has long been a controversial issue. This is particularly true and important in the era that technology development itself can no longer guarantee the creation of new markets. How to determine the potential of a new technology for which no market yet exists, therefore, becomes a vital but challenging task. The current study put its emphasis on designing a user-centric approach for product innovation based on lead user method, and on examining whether such an approach is helpful in maximising the success rate of technology innovation as well as the potential for market launch. A pilot project of designing mobile and internet products and applications derived by the proposed approach was conducted to scrutinise the feasibility and plausibility of this approach. The role of brainstorming in the marketing of technology-driven innovation is especially reconsidered and highlighted. Findings and suggestions are provided a...

Remediation of practices: How new media change the ways we see and do things in practical domains

Based on two ethnographic studies of technology-driven innovation in music education and judicial practice, in this paper I investigate the nature and meaning of mediation as a primary aspect of our way of experiencing and understanding reality. I explore what happens in an established domain of practice when the introduction of new technologies, such as the computer and video recording, requires practitioners to work with a new medium for carrying out their practices. In spite of the apparent distance of the two practical domains, music and the judicial, the two cases point to surprisingly similar phenomena affecting the nature of objects, the relationship between objects and their representations, and the perceptual and practical skills of the practitioners. The paper shows to what extent a practice is embedded in the medium and discusses the coping strategies that musicians and judges enact in order to make sense of and master the new media, and to reweave the ripped fabric of their practice.

Experimentation and Innovation in U.S. Publishing Today: Findings from the Book Industry Study Group

In February 2008 the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) conducted a survey of U.S. publishers to determine the extent of technology-driven innovation and experimentation. The survey findings were published alongside a set of 10 case studies in May 2008 as “From experimentation to innovation in the digital age—case studies from the North American Book Industry 2008”. This article, written by Michael Healy, Executive Director of the BISG, summarizes the circumstances that led to the survey and shares the key findings.

Mechanism of realizing industrial structure upgrading through technology-driven regional innovation capacity

Mechanism of realizing industrial structure upgrading through technology-driven regional innovation capacity

Trends in Robotic Surgery

Robotic surgery began as a technology-driven innovation but is now becoming a genuine method of improving healthcare effectiveness worldwide. This comprehensive review introduces the current trends, using examples of specific systems to distinguish the various types of robotic surgical devices, from remote handling machines to those performing delicate local interventions. We end by commenting on how to extend existing systems and provide an account of the rapid developments in minimally invasive robotic surgery.

The impact of the new technologies — Permanent paradigm shift or transitory aberration?

The paper discusses what lasting legacy remains from the widespread use of technology to create new products, companies, business models and marketing processes. The highest-profile failure of technology-driven innovation has been the dot.com companies, but the list also extends to the faltering business models of the telecommunications, software and entertainment suppliers and the disappointment with the business benefits delivered by CRM and knowledge management. The paper investigates the reasons why so many failures have occurred, and suggests how the marketer can ensure that the same mistakes will not be repeated in the future.

Hospital cost of endovascular versus open repair of abdominal aortic aneurysms: A multicenter study

Background: Technology-driven innovation in medicine is frequently associated with higher costs than conventional therapy. A significantly higher cost for endovascular ($21,250, n = 190) versus open abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair ($12,342, n = 60) was suggested by a direct cost analysis of patients in a multicenter trial. Estimated inpatient costs (not charges) incurred nationwide by hospitals for endovascular and open repair of AAA were studied to validate these observed trends.Methods: A retrospective analysis of 131 patients undergoing endovascular AAA repair was compared with 49 patients undergoing open repair as part of a Food and Drug Administration phase II prospective multicenter clinical investigation (AneuRx-Medtronic). A model to estimate costs was constructed using important clinical descriptors of these patients. These clinical characteristics where then matched with those from 22,460 patients undergoing AAA repair obtained from a large national database (Medicare Provider Analysis and Review). Estimated hospital cost was then assigned to each study patient according to the national average of the total hospital costs for the respective matched patients in Medicare Provider Analysis and Review.Results: Total inpatient hospital costs of endovascular repair were significantly higher than that of open repair ($19,985 ± 7396 versus $12,546 ± 5944, respectively, P =.0001). Endograft device cost ($10,400) accounted for 52% of the total cost of endovascular repair. The 1999 mean blended Medicare reimbursement for AAA repair was $18,989.Conclusion: In this early development stage, hospital cost for endovascular AAA repair is significantly greater than open repair when device cost greatly exceeds $5000. Although incremental reductions in cost of endovascular repair may be anticipated if use of diagnostic studies, operating time, and length of stay decrease, device cost has the single greatest impact on the expense of endovascular AAA repair. At current device pricing, mean blended Medicare reimbursement does not cover the cost of endovascular AAA repair.