Boundary-spanning in academic healthcare organisations

New Game, Old Rules? Mechanisms and Consequences of Legitimation in Boundary Spanning Activities

“…On the other hand, boundary spanning aims to transform the distribution and 'exchange rate' of the agents' capital assets (Bourdieu, [1984] 2010). For instance, collaborative partnerships between universities and healthcare organizations aspire to modify the 'rules of the game' by increasing the relative value of scientific capital in the healthcare field and the relative value of clinical capital in the scientific field (Lander, 2016). Furthermore, they are expected to institutionalize these novel patterns of capital valorization (and related cross-boundary practices), thus opening up a 'new game' which would be markedly different from pre-existing established fields and practices with their specific sets of (old) rules (also see Kislov, 2014).…”

Hospitals and innovation: Introduction to the special section

“…At the level of the individual researcher we have seen that research-based medical innovation seems to benefit strongly from hospital involvement in terms of contact with patients and healthcare workers (Llopis and D'Este, 2016;Ali and Gittelman, 2016), although there may be decreasing returns to this effect (Llopis and D'Este, 2016) and several barriers when it comes to including clinicians in research projects (Lander, 2016). Such barriers are also seen at the organisational level where there are many challenges in combining commercially oriented goals of innovation with healthcare goals, despite some optimism among different types of personnel in hospitals and policy makers (Miller and French, 2016).…”

“…Hospitals are not just bridges and brokers in the development of innovations but also in wider collaborative processes of selection and adaption, although less is known about the costs and benefits of such open innovation processes within a wider system (Thune and Mina, 2016). There are also signs that the "close to the bedside" research and innovation paradigm which has been a key feature of hospitals has increasingly become dominated by a laboratory-based paradigm based on genetics and molecular biology, and questions are raised about whether the possibilities for combining the two paradigms in "translational research" are efficient or even possible (Gittelman, 2016;Miller and French, 2016;Lander, 2016). The case of the personalised cancer drug Herceptin ® is interesting because it shows how hospitals' current innovation activities extend beyond the traditional roles and help doing "institutional work" such as the creation of new markets and influencing regulation through political and media pressure together with firms and patient organisations (Kukk et al, 2016).…”

“…These paradigms do not simply denote different objects and methods of research (bench versus bedside) but more fundamental learning strategies, belief systems and institutional arrangements (Gittelman, 2016). The articles have discussed the paradigms of clinical research versus basic biomedical research (Lander, 2016;Ali and Gittelman, 2016), "care" versus "science" (Llopis and D'Este, 2016) and "innovation for healthcare benefits" versus "innovation for commercial benefits" (Miller and French, 2016). To some extent these clashes are internal to research hospitals because these large and complex organisations are engaged in many different forms of research and innovationoriented activities.…”

Multidisciplinary research: should effort be the measure of success?

“…Studies have focused on frameworks and models to describe this process as well as evaluating the effectiveness of organisational frameworks at shaping project outcomes (Huang and Newell, 2003;Lander, 2016;Hunter et al, 2011;Wang, 2016;Martin--de--Castro et al, 2008). A number of models of knowledge creation have been developed (Hessels and Lente, 2008;Berker and Bharathi, 2012).…”