The barriers to empowering niche-innovations in long-term care

Abstract

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...

Roles of innovation in strengthening strategic delta planning processes : The case of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

“…Innovations that entered the delta planning process are critically analyzed to identify characteristics of successful innovations (Royal HaskoningDHV, 2013). Ultimately, since this research examines radical innovations that aim to bring about a transition from a fragmented, conventionally driven planning system to an integrated, strategically driven planning system (Cramer, 2014), the final chapter of this thesis provides a synthesis of findings, reflecting back on how innovations traveled, in the case of Vietnam, across the various phases of the SDP process, for sustainable development in the future. The central idea of the SDP process is that an innovation does not exist as a discrete entity; rather, an innovation develops interdependencies across social, technical, and institutional dimensions (Geels and Schot, 2007).…”