Collaborative innovation in healthcare

Rising healthcare costs and vast business opportunities in health markets have resulted in a great demand to enhance innovation creation. However, innovation development in healthcare is challenging because of the fragmented and complicated context. Potential means to tackle the challenges include utilising the concepts of open innovation and co-creation, which require organisations to develop new roles and relationships with multiple stakeholders. This paper analyses a 12-month co-creation project where a new collaboration model for healthcare innovations was developed by a hospital, research partners, and companies. We demonstrate how organisations experiment with collaborative innovation in the healthcare context, and what was learned from this experimentation. The study utilises an action research approach and a case study strategy. The co-creation model applied can produce innovations that meet the end-users’ needs, but successful implementation requires careful planning, creating separate development paths for idea-type and more mature solutions, and the commitment of project participants.