Translating employee-driven innovation in healthcare: Bricolage and the mobilization of scarce resources

ABSTRACT

With top-down models of innovation failing to address the entrenched problems of healthcare, policy-makers have proposed that staff working on the frontline might be better placed to innovate solutions. Drawing on a study of employee-driven innovation in UK public healthcare, the authors explore the process through which staff innovate without the resources that support policy implementation, showing how the translation of ideas from problematization to practice is underpinned by ‘bricolage’—the appropriation and repurposing of resources ‘at hand’.

IMPACT

This paper clarifies how staff innovate services on the ground when resources are scarce. The authors suggest that, where employees—clinicians and practitioners—are driving innovation, they engage in a creative process to mobilize resources; appropriating and repurposing local funding, available space, delivery models and even the labour of staff at all levels. This bricolage provides necessary support to the contingent, and often lengthy translation of employees’ innovation ideas into practice. These insights become more critical in a post-pandemic context that demands innovative solutions to new service delivery challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Bricolage
• employee-driven innovation
• funding
• healthcare
• implementation
• innovation process
• resources
• translation

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies. LLAKES is an ESRC-funded Research Centre: grant reference ES/J019135/1

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).