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In broad terms, current thinking and literature on the spread of innovations in health care presents it as the study of two unconnected processes—diffusion across adopting organizations and implementation within adopting organizations. Evidence from the health care environment and beyond, however, shows the significance and systemic nature of postadoption challenges in sustainably implementing innovations at scale. There is often only partial diffusion of innovative practices, initial adoption that is followed by abandonment, incomplete or tokenistic implementation, and localized innovation modifications that do not provide feedback to inform global innovation designs.Critical Theoretical Analysis Such important barriers to realizing the benefits of innovation question the validity of treating diffusion and implementation as unconnected spheres of activity. We argue that theorizing the spread of innovations should be refocused toward what we call embedding innovation—the question of how innovations are successfully implemented at scale. This involves making the experience of implementation a central concern for the system-level spread of innovations rather than a localized concern of adopting organizations.Insight/Advance To contribute to this shift in theoretical focus, we outline three mechanisms that connect the experience of implementing innovations locally to their diffusion globally within a health care system: learning, adapting, and institutionalizing. These mechanisms support the distribution of the embedding work for innovation across time and space.Practical Implications Applying this focus enables us to identify the self-limiting tensions within existing top-down and bottom-up approaches to spreading innovation. Furthermore, we outline new approaches to spreading innovation, which better exploit these embedding mechanisms.

Previous work has highlighted the direct effect of epistemic differences between groups on knowledge translation work. In this paper, we ask whether such differences in the 'ways of knowing' amongst expert groups may also have an indirect effect on knowledge translation efforts by shaping the social network ties which are formed between groups. Our empirical study of a major knowledge translation initiative in the English NHS (National Health Service) is based on a social network analysis of the ties between groups. It shows that epistemic differences are reflected in homophilous patterns of social ties - i.e. members of expert groups tending to share knowledge with each other. Academic groups, and especially social scientists, exhibit more inward-looking patterns of networking. Individuals with multi- disciplinary expertise were found to be more likely to act as the boundary-spanners between groups. Over time, members of the health sciences discipline helped to provide a bridge between social scientists and healthcare practitioner groups (clinicians and managers). Our study makes several contributions to theoretical and practical understandings of knowledge translation in healthcare by not only showing how epistemic differences may indirectly impact such work via their structuring of social networks, but also providing evidence on the multi-disciplinary expertise in determining the boundary-spanning position of individuals

Evidence-based management (EBM) encourages managers to draw upon evidence in decision-making. It is increasingly clear, however, that doing so often involves multiple actors, mobilizing multiple ev...

Digital innovation introduces a new open-ended value landscape to anyone seeking to generate or capture new value. To understand this landscape, we distinguish between design recombination and use recombination, explore how they play out together, and redirect the attention from products and services toward digital resources. Digital resources serve as building-blocks in digital innovation, and they hold the potential to simultaneously be part of multiple value paths, offered through design recombination and assembled through use recombination. Building on this perspective, we offer the value spaces framework as a tool for better understanding value creation and capture in digital innovation. We illustrate the framework and offer the early contours of a research agenda for information systems researchers.

Recent work has questioned the institutional model of management innovation by highlighting interactions between the field-level actors engaged in diffusing innovations and implementation of the innovation at organization level. Focusing on the adaptation of management innovations to their context, rather than their creation, we review this work and use it to analyse the global diffusion of resource planning (RP), counter posing this case with the widely studied example of total quality management. Both of these innovations experienced a high level of failure when implemented by organizations. Total quality management's diffusion was characterized by a ‘boom and bust’ cycle. RP, however, has continued to spread globally in the form of its variants: MRP, MRPII and ERP. Our analysis seeks to account for the long-run diffusion of RP through a processual model which highlights the interplay between RP's discursive framing at field level, the affordances of the innovation itself and its adaptation within organizations. This demonstrates how objectifying RP in software not only helped to spread the innovation but also allowed field-level actors to differentiate its development as a successful innovation from the many failures experienced by organizations attempting to adapt it.

Digital technology, with its distinctive characteristics that result from the fundamental process of digitalization that underpins it, is seen as fundamentally altering processes of creativity. However, we currently have limited understanding of creativity in relation to the development of digital technology. Computer game development, with its combination of esthetic, affective and cultural use features and highly sophisticated digital technologies, is a valuable setting for investigating these issues. In this paper, we explore how computer games are shaped through the interplay between the creative intentions of developers and the digital technologies involved in their production and playing. Drawing on in-depth studies conducted at three leading computer game development studios and a leading producer of the software system used in game development, this paper shows how the game developers' creative ideas for imagined novel game-playing experiences relate to a) the development of relevant digital technologies, and b) the emergence of new game development practices. The article goes on to propose a view of creativity as an on-going flow that, following an initial ‘creative impulse’, ripples through the sociomaterial entanglements of a particular setting, reconfiguring them in the process and spreading out in time and space in often unexpected ways.

The deal–making process requires entrepreneurial actors to create and maintain wide networks of weak ties while simultaneously developing stronger collaborative ties that will enable opportunities to be realized. We currently lack an adequate account of how these activities are integrated by deal–makers under conditions of risk and uncertainty. In an empirical study of deal making in early–stage technology ventures, we find that deal–makers rely on different forms of trust in the early and later phases. Based on this study, we develop a process model and propositions on the role of trust in integrating strong and weak ties in deal making.

In this chapter we examine the origins, nature and practical implications of the idea of “community of practice”. We argue that the concept has been used both to illuminate the challenges of creating a “learning culture” in health care and to establish initiatives promote knowledge transfer and sharing. After clarifying some of the key concepts under discussion, the chapter illustrates the general features of this broad family of interventions, discusses their characteristics and summarizes their key success factors. It also shows how the ideas of community of practice and situated learning have been applied in diverse ways by health care organizations and funders, how theses ways of knowing and learning have been inserted into the established institutional order, and the mixed, but sometimes promising, outcomes which have flowed from them.

Studies suggest that the experience of liminality – of being in an ambiguous, ‘betwixt and between’ position – has creative potential for organizations. We contribute to theory on the link between liminality and creative agency through a study of the coordinators of ‘knowledge-sharing communities’; one of the latest examples of a ‘neo-bureaucratic’ practice that seeks to elicit innovative responses from employees while intensifying control by the organization. Through a role-centred perspective, our study found that both the structural and interpretive aspects of coordinators’ role enactments promoted a degree of creative agency. ‘Front-stage’ and ‘back-stage’ activities were developed to meet the divergent expectations posed by senior management and community members, and the ambiguity of their roles prompted an array of different role interpretations. Our findings contribute to theory by showing how the link between liminality and creative agency is not confined to roles and spaces (consultancy work, professional expertise) that are positioned across organizational boundaries, or free from norms and expectations, but may also apply to roles that are ambiguously situated within organizational contexts and that are subject to divergent expectations. This shows how neo-bureaucratic forms may be both reproduced and renewed through the creative responses of individual managers.

PurposeThe paper aims to take a reflective stance on the relationship between policy/evidence and practice, which, the authors argue, is conceptually under‐developed. The paper aims to show that current research perspectives fail to frame evidence and policy in relation to practice.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative study was conducted in the English NHS in four Primary Care Trusts (PCTs). Seventy‐five observations of meetings and 52 semi‐structured interviews were completed. The approach to data analysis was to explore and reconstruct narratives of PCT managers' real practices.FindingsThe exploratory findings are presented through two kinds of narratives. The first narrative vividly illustrates the significance of the active involvement, skills and creativity of health care practitioners for policy implementation. The second narrative elucidates how problems of collaboration among different experts in PCTs might emerge and affect evidence utilisation in practice.Practical implicationsThe findings exemplify that policies are made workable in practice and, hence, policy makers may also need to be mindful of practical intricacies and conceive policy implementation as an iterative process.Originality/valueThe contribution of this paper lies in offering an alternative and important perspective to the debate of utilisation of policy/evidence in health care management and in advancing existing understanding of health care management practice. The paper's rich empirical examples demonstrate some important dimensions of the complexity of practice.

Many different types of organizations use projects to accomplish specific tasks, especially tasks that involve innovation and change. However, there are often problems associated with both learning within projects and learning transfer from projects to the wider organization. Previous research suggests that these problems vary according to the organizational context, in particular the extent to which the organization is centred on the delivery of projects. Also, the link between project-based learning and organizational learning may be far from seamless, and may require the deployment of a range of learning mechanisms to be effective. In this article we explore and explain these problems through an empirical study which examined project-based learning across different organizational contexts. This study highlights the limitations of learning mechanisms based on reflection and codification. It suggests that firms generally only learn from projects, if at all, via the accumulation of experience amongst groups and individuals. The study suggests, however, that the accumulation of experience is most pronounced in organizational contexts which are project centred and where project management capabilities are well developed. In contrast, in organizations where projects are more varied and occasional, the struggle to exploit the highly heterogeneous forms of learning created within projects is greater.

This paper contributes to the growing interest in the institutionalization of innovation. Drawing on the work of Barley and Tolbert (1997), the paper develops a processual approach to institutionalization which emphasizes the interplay between local level adoption of innovations, and their field-level diffusion. This interplay is seen linked to the emergence of key mechanisms of institutionalization, including role specialization, boundary-spanning activities and the production of discourse. The paper develops this processual approach through an historical, multi-level account of the evolution and spread of Resource Planning systems innovation, from the 1960's to the present-day culminating in the current generation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. This empirical account allows us explore the coevolution of key institutionalizing mechanisms and relate them to the development of the technologies involved. In particular, the relationship between field-level shifts in technology and the expanding scope, and challenges, of their use at local level are analysed in terms of a process of disembedding and embedding organizational and technological forms of knowledge. The resulting analysis helps us to account for the apparent contradiction between the widespread acceptance of ERP systems innovation and the chronic problems experienced in the use of such innovation. It leads to the view that RP systems innovation has become institutionalized within business practice in part because of, and not despite, the frequent failures associated with its adoption.

Knowledge-based competitive advantage erodes if it is not continually refreshed. Organisations increasingly rely on projects to enhance their knowledge-base through specific project deliverables such as new products and technologies. But, to do this, projects must go beyond the specific deliverables for which they are designed, and also become sites and opportunities for the creation, mobilisation and integration of knowledge. In this article we argue that projects interact with the organisation's knowledge base primarily through three key activities: (a) by mobilising knowledge that is needed to meet project objectives; (b) by creating knowledge within and through the project; and (c) by integrating knowledge during the project. We further argue that these knowledge-related activities take place at multiple levels of the organisation. Specifically, they occur at the interorganisational level when multiple organisations work together, at the intraorganisational level where different functions and business units are called to support and collaborate on projects, at the interproject level where populations of projects share and exchange knowledge, and at the intraproject level where knowledge is bound up with team and leadership dynamics. We use examples from the Special Issue to illustrate different project-related knowledge activities and different organisational levels at which these activities take place. This analysis helps to illuminate the wider range of roles which projects may play in exploiting knowledge within and between firms. A number of practical implications flow from this analysis. We conclude with reflections on the evolution of projects as key sites for improving the competitive performance of the organisation.

In their research essay, Davison and Martinsons (2011) criticise the ‘methodological monism’ and narrowness of information systems (IS) research. They suggest that the use of a rather parsimonious set of research methods, notably those that follow the positivist tradition, demonstrates a significant degree of methodological exclusiveness. They claim that this exclusivity is counterproductive to good IS research and unethical. They make four key arguments in support of their position. They conclude by saying that the methodological monism of IS research is responsible for the ‘impoverished contribution of IS research to organisational realities’. They say this situation represents ‘a malaise that lies at the heart of the IS discipline’ and contributes to the lack of relevance of IS research. They make some recommendations as to how this malaise might be overcome.

Valuable knowledge in organizations is too often ‘locked in’ within one unit. The contribution of this paper is to provide insights into the knowledge-sharing effect of inter-unit coordination mechanisms. This topic has not yet received in-depth study. We fill this gap with a case study of a UK-based multinational, in which we explore knowledge sharing between business units. Data was collected using a questionnaire and interviews. The findings from our study highlight that formal coordination is preferable. Informal networking as an inter-unit coordination mechanism was not perceived as beneficial for knowledge sharing. The knowledge-sharing enablers, trust and knowledge complexity, largely dominated the possibilities for inter-unit knowledge sharing whatever coordination was used. Especially, the perceived knowledge complexity caused problems that could not be fully compensated for by any type of coordination mechanism. The study also highlights the unexpectedly minor role of common knowledge and the only indirect effect of coordination through values.

A common strategy to transfer knowledge from projects is for project teams to capture ‘lessons learned’ and store these on a database for others to access. This strategy is widely adopted but such databases are not widely used. This article explores why cross-project knowledge transfer fails, using data from 13 projects in six organizations. Following Cook and Brown, the analysis focuses on why knowledge captured from one project is typically not used as a ‘tool of knowing’ by others. The results suggest that the knowledge captured is not deemed useful and/or project teams lack awareness that there is knowledge that could be useful to help them improve their processes.

Existing studies suggest that, because knowledge is becoming more widely distributed, innovation increasingly needs to occur ‘at the interstices’ of collaborating groups and organizations. Networked innovation processes are therefore emphasized, over more hierarchical or market-based forms, as having distinct advantages for the creation and integration of knowledge. Whilst the structural properties of networks have been heavily scrutinized, there is relatively less understanding of processes, in particular the political dynamics that shape networked innovation. This article aims to develop understanding of networked innovation processes, by identifying and relating the characteristics of networked innovation to the productive, or constraining, effects of different dimensions of power (power of resource, meaning and process). It does this through comparative analysis of three case studies of networked innovation, each involving the development of new technology. This analysis suggests that understanding the politics of networked innovation depends on understanding the generative (and sometimes degenerative) relationship between power, knowledge integration, network formation, and the role of technology. Moreover, the co-ordination of networks, rather than simply their formation, is found to play a particularly crucial role.

This paper aims to analyse the role and responses of professional groups and their media outlets in relation to fashionable management discourses. Although much emphasis has been given to the role played by ‘knowledge entrepreneurs’ in sponsoring and exploiting management fashion, this risks neglecting the degree of adaptation and re-invention involved in translating these ideas into practice. Professional groups, in particular, can be seen as mediators of the spread and assimilation of fashionable discourses. In an empirical study we sought to analyse the importance and implications of this mediating role by focussing on the academic and professional media associated with Human Resource (HR) and Information Systems (IS) practitioners and their responses to one of the most influential management fashions of the recent period—Knowledge Management (KM). The initial stage of the study involved a qualitative and quantitative review of the IS and HR literature to identify the critical elements of their response to the KM discourse. This highlighted the role of legitimation, differentiation and inter-professional competition as features of professional media's ‘theorization’ of new management fashions. A further element of the study focussed on a particular HR magazine sponsored by the HR profession. Analysis of these articles suggests that this magazine has evolved a distinctive perspective on KM, one which highlights the employee and behavioural issues associated with its application compared to the more IT-driven rhetorics found in the mainstream literature. The rhetorical claims of the new discourse were thereby interwoven with the overarching knowledge claims of the HR profession.

Social capital, which derives from the network of social relationships in which people are embedded, has increasingly been seen as a resource that firms can use and which enables them to tap into and exploit their intellectual capital and, thus, release the firm's innovative potential. Yet, in project-based organizations, there remain many barriers and pitfalls in any attempt to exploit human resource potential in this way. In particular, the one-off nature of project tasks and teams and the importance of individuals' embodied knowledge and learning ensure that while social capital may assume greater importance, at the same time its capture becomes more problematic. This paper presents findings from a research project undertaken in the UK that explores knowledge management for project-based learning across a range of industrial sectors, including construction. Drawing upon a case study analysis of project-based learning in a construction firm, it applies an already established framework to examine the par...

This paper explores the implications of an increasing reliance on project forms for learning within organizations. In particular, we focus on the tensions between learning at project level and the stocks and flows of organizational knowledge. Based on a review of the existing literature, we outline propositions on two major processes of project-based learning (PBL): ‘learning-by-absorption’ and ‘learning-by-reflection’. Subsequently, the paper applies and refines this framework through the analysis of the findings from a qualitative study of three linked projects in the UK water industry. The findings from our study support and highlight the role of the above-noted processes in determining the extent and transfer of PBL. In particular, they indicate the role played by ‘quasi-organizational’ forms in enabling ‘learning-by-absorption’ and ‘learning-by-reflection’ at a project level. But equally, they help to explain limitations on the ability of project-based learning to bring about significant changes in knowledge stocks and flows in the wider organization.

This paper seeks to analyse the extent to which organizations can learn from projects by focusing on the relationship between projects and their organizational context. The paper highlights three dimensions of project-based learning: the practice-based nature of learning, project autonomy and knowledge integration. This analysis generates a number of propositions on the relationship between the learning generated within projects and its transfer to other parts of the organization. In particular, the paper highlights the ‘learning boundaries’ which emerge when learning within projects creates new divisions in practice. These propositions are explored through a comparative analysis of two case studies of construction projects. This analysis suggests that the learning boundaries which develop around projects reflect the nested nature of learning, whereby different levels of learning may substitute for each other. Learning outcomes in the cases can thus be analysed in terms of the interplay between organizational learning and project-level learning. The paper concludes that learning boundaries are an important constraint on attempts to exploit the benefits of project-based learning for the wider organization.

The article explores the development of systems of human capital evaluation in a number of large UK firms. Human capital is a much used term in business literature, and it is widely recognised that firms need to develop mechanisms to determine the value of their employee base. An extensive human capital literature has developed in which the authors propose elaborate systems for measuring a firm's human assets. This article does not seek to offer yet another human capital model. Rather, the aim is to examine the management practices through which human capital evaluation is undertaken. The article is based on an exploratory study of such practices in 11 major firms in the UK. The findings are highlighted as follows. First, we note the preference for internal over external (static accountancy-based) reporting. Secondly, we highlight the diverse nature of human capital evaluation systems that exist across UK business. Thirdly, we explore the relationship between practices of evaluation and the role and position of the HR function within the firm. Finally, in conclusion, we address the implications of the human capital perspective for practitioners, arguing that there is no single formula that can be applied to its evaluation. We go on to suggest that the importance of the human capital concept and its measurement may lie in its ability to re-frame perceptions of the relationship between the contribution of employees and the competitive performance of the business.

Recently, there has been a shift in the way management scholars view the firm, from traditional models that are based on ideas of opportunism and market failure to newer knowledge-based theories that argue for a more socialized perspective. One of the key components of these theories is the notion of social capital. Social capital is the set of resources that accrue to an individual or group by virtue of their social connections. As such, it is a resource that is jointly owned. Most recent research adopts a more-is-better approach to social capital, suggesting that individuals with larger quantity of ties derive more positive benefits. However in this paper, we argue that using social capital has both benefits and drawbacks for organizations, and that these positive and negative aspects of social capital occur simultaneously. To substantiate our claim, we use data collected from sets of interviews with senior and middle managers in two organizations in the United Kingdom. Our findings indicate that while social capital has many beneficial effects with respect to information access and retrieval, community building, and underlying group norms, there are also a number of less-beneficial aspects, which are under-explored in the current empirical literature. Furthermore, we suggest that organizations must develop an understanding of the bridging and bonding elements of social capital, as these are critical for its implementation. Implications of the research findings and future research directions are discussed.

This paper aims to explore Castells’ proposition that the innovation process is being progressively intensified by developments in technological and organizational forms – that knowledge is being applied to the generation of knowledge. The paper focuses on the emergence and implementation of knowledge management (KM), and its particular application in Ebank. A global approach to KM focussing on intranet technology proved unsuccessful. In explaining this outcome, the paper focuses on the constraints posed by the social embeddedness of knowledge as having a crucial effect. In this case, such embeddedness seemed to be linked to the lack of extensive intra‐organizational networks and the disparate identities developed by the different business units of the firm. These findings highlight several implications for KM's role in the innovation process.