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PrefaceWith this preface, I first introduce how this thesis came into being. Secondly, I acknowledge the people who supported and influenced me during the four years of my research on niche-innovations.A bit more than four years ago, a day before I defended my master thesis on corporate diversification strategies at Tilburg University, I received an e-mail from my supervisor asking me if I would be interested in doing a PhD at the University of Twente. Five days later, it was December 23 rd 2009, a day before Christmas, Iwas sitting in Geert Dewulf's office, talking about the PhD trajectory for two and a half hours. The research project was about developing strategies in a nicheinnovation project that primarily concerned the cooperation of two long-term care organizations. It was subsidized by a transition program that aimed at changing the long-term care system. I was very interested in the topic as I saw a good opportunity to continue my research on strategy development. Yet in a new domain: long-term care. As it felt like the right time, the right place and the right people, I started my research in January 2010. Initially, being a fresh graduate who was boosted with pure confidence, I was keen to support the strategy development in the project. Throughout the four years, however, I learned that there are all kinds of barriers hindering the development of strategies for niche-innovations which show that the long-term care system has not been ready for change.While the project was running smoothly throughout 2010, it abruptly ended shortly after the subsidy ended in 2011. Hence, I had to look for other cases to develop strategies out of niche-innovations. I wrote a proposal that outlined how the lessons learned in the original project could be used in a new project. One of the participating long-term care organizations of the original project accepted the proposal in 2012. I started conducting interviews as well as holding a workshop to form new strategies out of niche-innovations. But half a year later, the project was cancelled due to an organizational restructuring. I was asked to use the insights in the previous project to re-write the proposal in order to develop integrated longterm care strategies. In 2013, I conducted another 20 interviews. But also this project was cancelled after my key contact person was fired. In the meantime, I integrated my ideas about strategy development in a proposal that we (Geert Dewulf, Hans Voordijk and I) wrote with researchers from Germany and Norway for the Framework Programme 7 (FP7) of the European Union. Unfortunately, our proposal scored just below the threshold. As a consequence of all these drawbacks, vi I started to refocus my research to highlight the importance of understanding the barriers to change so that future programs can enable the change of the long-term care system. In so doing, I used the data of the original project, and data from a retrospective study on two other niche-innovation projects that also participated in the transition program.Writing a th...

This study demonstrates how action research (AR) that is aimed at scalingup experiments can be applied to support a strategy formation process (SFP) in a subsidized long-term care network. Previous research has developed numerous AR frameworks to support experiments in various domains, but has failed to explain how to apply AR and action learning (AL) on the strategic level of organizational networks. Given this situation, we used a generic AR framework to explore its usefulness in supporting SFPs. The framework consists of four steps: (1) identifying the problem situation, (2) planning a solution, (3) taking action, and (4) reflecting on the action. The results show that utilizing AL in AR helps actors to reflect on and understand the challenges in forming a joint strategy in a network. We demonstrate that it can help to visualize the process and to create a common ground for discussion, to create a shared vision as well as commitment to scaling-up experiments. These insights should be used in future SFPs in networks. However, the results also show that the key barrier, the lack of executive commitment, was only identified at a late stage. This paper constitutes a first step toward a more sophisticated AR framework for strategy research. The mistakes highlighted here should help others avoid them in the future.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide new insights into barriers to sustaining and scaling-up housing and community-care innovations related to changing the long-term care (LTC) system. Design/methodology/approach – Two housing and community-care experiments were studied. The 11 barriers and four core themes identified to the scaling-up of these experiments were analysed using the three theoretical concepts from the transitions literature: shielding, nurturing, and empowering innovations. Findings – The barriers included shielding through subsidies without having organizational or political commitment, nurturing networks that underestimated the size of the housing and community-care innovations, and a failed empowerment because of regulatory uncertainty – not knowing the rules of tomorrow and ignoring the reality that it takes time to spread the lessons learnt in experiments. Research limitations/implications – Housing and community-care innovations need to pay less attention to subsidies and focus more on learning from the experiments, spreading the ideas, and creating commitment from policymakers so that the innovations become empowered. Originality/value – Empirical insights into the barriers to sustaining and scaling-up housing and community-care innovations into the LTC system are provided and propositions for future transition programmes formulated.

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