Helping start-ups and public organisations to align: Co-producing the co-creation context in a public hospital

ABSTRACT

Incubation facilitates innovation performance and knowledge production for large organisations, while allowing start-ups to connect with potential users who hold valuable information. However, aligning the goals of parent organisations and hosted start-ups in co-creation partnerships remains a challenge, particularly in the complex and institutional context of public organisations. To fill the research gap, this paper draws on the co-production theory of support to explore how a large public organisation co-produces an adaptive context for co-creation with start-ups. Based on a 12-month ethnography in a public university hospital centre, the unique characteristics and complexities of co-creation initiatives in public organisations are explored by focusing on the multi-stakeholder nature of the innovation process. Following a processual approach, we unpack the evolving dynamics of managing tensions through the co-creation process. The article contributes to the understanding of public incubators, compensatory practices in asymmetrical co-creation relationships, and the co-production of incubation support in public organisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Incubation
• co-creation
• public organisation
• co-production theory
• healthcare

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the publisher for guiding us through the process, and the anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments. We would also like to thank the Mosaic HEC research community, especially Étienne Capron and Karl-Emanuel Dionne. Finally, we would like to thank the Foundation of HEC Montréal, the Quebec research funds FRQSC (grant B2Z-307339) and FRQS for funding this research.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Santé; Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture.

Notes on contributors

Margaux Manent

Margaux Manent is a PhD candidate in Management, Strategy and Entrepreneurship at HEC Montréal. For more than five years, she has been a member of Mosaic, the Creativity and Innovation Pole at HEC Montréal to work on innovation ecosystems. Her thesis work is anchored in the study of collective practices to support entrepreneurship. She focusses on new organisational forms resulting from the dynamics between various entrepreneurial actors in the Montreal healthcare ecosystem, in particular, experimental spaces to facilitate access to end users, enabling entrepreneurs to validate their innovations in clinical settings. In this paper, she was selected to document the co-creation process between a local start-up and a public university hospital in an unprecedented entrepreneurial support programme in Quebec.

Patrick Cohendet

Patrick Cohendet is full professor at HEC Montréal in the International Business Department. His research interests include Theory of the firm, Economics of Innovation, Economics of Knowledge, Economics of Creativity and Knowledge Management. He is the author of 20 books and over 150 articles in refereed journals, such as Research Policy, Organization Science, Industrial and corporate Change, Journal of Economic Geography, Long Range Planning, Industry and Innovation, etc. He was the supervisor of more than 70 ph.D students. He conducted a series of economic studies on the economics of innovation for different international organisations such as the European Commission, the Council of Europe, the European Space Agency or the Canadian Space Agency. He is co-director of the research group Mosaic at HEC Montréal on the management of innovation and creativity.

Laurent Simon

Laurent Simon is full professor in the Department of entrepreneurship and innovation at HEC Montréal. His research interests include issues in the management of creativity, organisational creativity, innovation management and open models of innovation. He is the co-author of several books and over 30 articles in refereed journals, such as Organization Science, Industry and Innovation, Journal of Economic Geography, or Regional Studies. As the co-director of Mosaic, the creativity and innovation hub at HEC Montréal, he leads and co-leads multiple action-research projects on the organisation of open innovation models in healthcare, sustainable mobility, creative industries, cultural organisation, and the arts.