Open Service Innovation in Health Care: What Can We Learn from Open Innovation Communities?

The purpose of the chapter is to describe and discuss how principles from open innovation, which are primarily derived from commercial product development, could be applied to open service innovation in non-profit health care organisations. To evaluate the drivers, barriers and prerequisites of such innovation, we performed an explorative study consisting of interviews with two rheumatologists, engaged in a Swedish research project on open innovation in health care. According to the interviews, the main driver was considered to be “the empowered patient”, holding a good knowledge of his or her disease. Barriers to open innovation were the lack of meeting places for patients, a strong local variation in how health care services are delivered and an organisational culture which does not promote learning and innovations. It is necessary for health care organisations to change their current culture of closed innovation, implying that only physicians have valid knowledge about patients’ diseases. Other necessary prerequisites for implementing open innovation principles are support from management and structures of financial control which encourage innovations. This explorative study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to combine principles of open innovation and health care services.