This study explores an alternative healthcare innovation project in its making using ethnographic research methods. The project is a confined space—a living lab—that cannot fully be described or explained in the same way we normally understand set-ups for healthcare innovation. By creating its own space, in the intersection between formal and informal structures, it draws our attention to a new way of organizing healthcare innovation. Taking an ethnographic research approach, it is suggested how a concept of a bubble can be used to describe the nature of the living lab as a partial and flexible object that constitutes multiple future possibilities. The concept of the bubble challenges the notion of the living lab as a cheese bell, which is the term used by the field participants, inspired by Clayton Christensen. Bringing in theoretical points from Bruno Latour regarding laboratories, this study explores the materiality of the laboratory and its political nature. The study contributes to the debate on innovation in healthcare and especially fuses to the discussion of how to organize healthcare innovation. It argues that we need to pay attention to new kinds of living labs—like the one introduced in this study.
There is an ongoing debate about how best to organize healthcare innovation. This article introduces and illustrates an alternative way of doing so by studying an emerging informal and inter-organizational network (IION) in practice. Taking an ethnographic research approach, the authors propose the concept of a potluck feast to de-scribe the nature of an IION and the dynamics within it. The relationship between the project and the actors is explored by introducing Steven Brown’s reading of Michel Serres’ concept of the parasite. The unique way of organizing healthcare innovation studied in the article involves an open, sharing approach, where everyone makes themselves an open resource for the project and where the contribution is determined by the actors’ own motivation rather than regulated by a formal setup and contracts. The article argues that the ethnographic research approach is useful to explore the emergence and dynamics of IIONs. In this way, this article contributes to the field of healthcare innovation and how to organize it, and may inspire those who are already in or intend to study this field.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.