Anchoring Tablets in Organizational Practices - a Practice Based Approach to the Digitalization of Board Work

Drawing on new technologies, decision makers attempt to design and make real visions for the future of organizations and society. Aiming for successful enactment, instead they are often faced with resistance or unintended changes to existing practices and values. This paper addresses this challenge from a practice theory perspective. Taking our departure in the reflexive dualities of practices and constitutive rules, we present and put into action an analytical model to shed light on how IS-enabled organizational change is enabled and sustained via dynamic interplay, inherent relations and performative enactment. The empirical material consists of interviews and observations in a Swedish municipality. The contribution includes an account as to how the enactment and definition of fundamental social relations affect the introduction of digital board packs via tablets to either serve as a catalyst to establish and reproduce new setups and practices in the board room or simply fail

Living Labs as Tools for Open Innovation

This paper presents a Living Lab in Stockholm as a focal point for discussing how the Living Lab concept can be extended and used for engaging in multiorganizational open innovation. Although Living Labs have been found to have potential for driving innovation through collaboration, more research is necessary to find tangible ways of organizing this kind of collaboration. The paper is explorative and empirically induced from an ongoing development and practical implementation of a Living Lab at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport - Sweden's largest airport situated outside Stockholm. This Airport Living Lab involves a number of large industrial and academic stakeholders aiming at ensuring multi-organizational innovation delivery. Of special interest is how the Living Lab concept should evolve to continue creating conditions for user-oriented innovations through multi-organizational collaboration which would not necessarily take place otherwise. Congruent with the explorative aim of the paper it ends up in a discussion about five propositions that should be on the agenda of research and implementation for Living Lab founders in the coming years.Living Labs, Open innovation, Electronic Collaboration Tools

Adopting Proactive Knowledge Use as an Innovation: The Case of a Knowledge Management System in Rheumatology

The aim of the study is to present a tentative framework to explore and investigate the drivers and barriers of adoption of the innovation of proactive knowledge use in connection to a knowledge management system (KMS) in health care. Semi-structured interviews were performed with champion implementers and physicians using the KMS along with a document analysis depicting significant events of the implementation process. The findings from the study suggested that drivers of the innovation were the characteristics of change agents, quality improvement, budget control and knowledge brought to the physician-patient dialogue by the KMS. In particular, there were indications of the KMS facilitating the process of making tacit knowledge explicit in the physician-patient dialogue. Identified barriers towards the innovation were resistance from clinical management, lack of motivation to share knowledge, lack of time and perceived flaws in the interface and compilation of data in the KMS

Through the Printing Press: An Account of Open Practices in the Swedish Newspaper Industry

Organizational practices that foster a dialogic relationship between organizations and their constituent customers have created an arena for inbound and outbound innovation. At the nexus of this development occurring in the media industries, these flows are carried by various forms of digital, social media and an increasing digital presence in the form of dynamic websites with varying degrees of interactive capabilities. In this paper, we posit that the newspaper industry is torn between indifference and cautious apprehension caused by the difficulty in marrying the journalism profession’s carefully guarded gatekeeping practices with the revolving doors of open innovation. Gatekeeping has emerged as a fiercely defended cornerstone for the industry and the profession of journalism itself is not enough to distinguish amateurs from professionals; for the segregation between professionals and amateurs to carry weight rather than being reduced to a hollow title, the segregation needs a practice that explicitly enforces gatekeeping—where actions speak louder than titles. Against this backdrop, we pursue the following research question: Why has IT-enabled open innovation become such a contentious issue in the context of the newspaper industry? Combining contextual in-situ ethnographic interviews and observation with an industry-wide content analysis of Swedish newspaper websites, we present an in-depth view of what IT-enabled open innovation means in the context of the newspaper industry. Results show that the process of legitimization inscribed by a particularly charged information technology—the printing press—continues to exert great influence in what constitutes open practice in the newspaper industry

Innovations in Health Care: Design Theory and Realist Evaluation Combined

Innovations in health care are often characterized by complexity and fuzzy boundaries, involving both the elements of the innovation and the organizational structure required for a full implementation. Evaluation in health care is traditionally based on the collection and dissemination of evidence-based knowledge stating the randomized controlled trial, and the quasi-experimental study design as the most rigorous and ideal approaches. These evaluation approaches capture neither the complexity of innovations in health care, nor the characteristics of the organizational structure of the innovation. As a result, the reasons for innovations in health care not being disseminated are not fully explained. The aim of the paper is to present a design-evaluation framework for complex innovations in health care in order to understand what works for whom under what circumstances combining design theory and realist evaluation. The framework is based on research findings of a case study of a complex innovation, a health care quality register, in order to understand underlying assumptions behind the design of the innovation, as well as the characteristics of the implementation process. The design-evaluation cycle is hypothesized to improve the design and implementation of complex innovation by using program/kernel theories to develop design principles, which are evaluated by realistic evaluation, resulting in further refinement of program/kernel theories. The goal of the design-evaluation cycle is to provide support to implementers and practitioners designing and implementing complex innovations in health care, for improving dissemination of complex innovations

The PREDICTS database: a global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts

Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species’ threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project – and avert – future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups – including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems – www.predicts.org.uk). We make site-level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015