Hospital Innovation Management: An Assessment of Two State-Owned Portuguese Hospitals

This work aims to assess how innovation is managed by state-owned hospitals in Portugal. From an initial literature review, two research questions arise, the first addressing the current status quo on the management of innovation activities, and the second questioning if an innovation management system can bring value to the existing processes.Based on the analysis of 10 interviews recorded in two institutions, how organisations manage innovation has been analysed.The main conclusions point to the fact that hospitals seek to develop a manageable innovation strategy, creating incentives and structures to support innovation activities by their workers and parties involved in the innovation ecosystem. However, they still have difficulty in maintaining a steady and continuous innovation activity, and also have significant difficulties in monitoring and evaluating the impact of innovation activities, and associated results, on the organisation. Despite the existence of several indicators to monitor the innovation processes, due to the lack of resources, it is the ex-ante and the ex-post assessment of the innovation projects are often disregarded.Considering the existing situation, and based on the evidence found, the implementation of an innovation management system could contribute to improve the performance of the organisation with regards to innovation. For that purpose, this work suggests the implementation of specific mechanisms to manage and monitor the innovation activities.As for future research activities, they could extend the scope of the study to private and public hospitals to compare best practices and use a mixed-method approach to improve the scientific outcomes.