Seven Ways to Inspire Innovation in the Health Technology Industry

Abstract

This article explores ways in which technological innovation can be bolstered in organizations that operate in the health technology industry. We present seven interventions at the team level (employee empowerment, servant leadership, hiring innovators, and scheduling time for innovation) and organizational level (intrapreneurship, flat management, and allowing for failure) that organizations can use to encourage and inspire innovation among employees. Given the increasingly dynamic nature of work within the health technology fields, in terms of both manufacturing processes and clinical developments, creating a culture of innovation and creativity and emboldening employees to regularly engage in such behaviors within these workplaces are critical.

Individual innovation is critical in the vast majority of jobs within complex organizations.1 The health technology industry is no exception, and in fact, innovation is particularly crucial for most firms to survive in technology-related fields.2

At the employee level, innovation refers to generating and promoting creative ideas and implementing those innovations within one's workplace.3 Given the rapid pace of change within this sector, organizations must not only depend on managerial-level employees to institute new ideas but also look to nonmanagerial employees to generate innovative solutions to existing product and market gaps.

In this article, we provide seven ways (four team-level and three organization-level interventions) in which managers can establish and foster a culture of employee innovation within their organizations.

Team-Level Interventions

1. Empower Employees

Employee empowerment involves delegating self-decision or -ownership to employees.4 Empowerment encourages workers to take control over how they spend their time and resources, motivating them to lead their own projects and work toward professional goals. At the same time, empowerment works best when managers set clear expectations for employees and outline the vision of their organizational department, thereby allowing employees to find the right alignment between their goals and those of the organization.

Research has shown that empowered employees are more productive and have higher levels of job satisfaction. Empowerment works because it encourages employees to think about the meaning, autonomy, competence, and impact of their job—both within and outside of their organization.5 Transferring power to employees in terms of decision-making (e.g., which projects to work on, which medical device ideas to advance) increases their sense of ownership over ideas and encourages innovation.6

Empowerment also has been shown to increase proactivity,7 making employees more likely to follow through with their ideas and pursue and persevere with creative projects.8 To remain innovative in the medical devices field, strong self-directed commitment from employees across the organization is vital.

For example, in 2014, the medical device segment of Johnson & Johnson (J&J) sought to improve its offerings following market research that reported an increasing demand for sustainable products by healthcare customers.9 To meet this demand and remain competitive in the sustainability market, J&J's medical device management team determined that obtaining strong engagement and commitment from employees was crucial. The following year, the company launched the “I Care. I Do.” employee engagement program, with the intent of inspiring employees to take action toward sustainable product innovation.

The results were exemplary, as multiple program sustainability ambassadors spearheaded substantial improvements that propelled J&J closer to its environmental stewardship and sustainability goals. For instance, one ambassador was recognized for reducing product packaging and incorporating 100% postconsumer recycled content into packing material. Another ambassador took the initiative to improve carbon dioxide emissions and reduce electricity costs by advocating for the construction of a wind turbine that now powers both of the company's processing plants in Cork, Ireland.

2. Adopt a Servant Leadership Model

Although the concept of servant leadership was developed in the 1970s,10 it recently has begun to attract the attention of practitioners and academics alike.11 This approach seeks to engage followers on multiple dimensions (relational, ethical, and emotional), with the goal of empowering them to grow into the best versions of themselves.12

The argument behind servant leadership is that when employees' well-being and growth are valued, they become more engaged and effective in their work. Managers who see themselves as servant leaders perceive their roles to be stewards of their organizations,13 attempting to grow the resources, including human resources, under their guidance. Rather than focusing on sacrificing people for profit14 or sacrificing profit for people, this framework emphasizes encouraging sustainable performance over the long term.

How does servant leadership encourage creativity and innovation? Studies have indicated that the servant leadership model fosters a positive team environment, including a service climate15 and knowledge sharing,16 both of which encourage the cross-pollination of ideas. When individuals feel like they are able to enter an open dialogue with the free exchange of ideas, the first seeds of innovation are often sown.

The most appropriate way to apply servant leadership in the medical device industry is to cultivate a culture of support and understanding through empathetic leadership. In practice, this would require managers within health technology–related professions to invest time and effort into prioritizing the well-being of their employees and taking on the role of serving their employees. Ultimately, positive work relationships that encourage clear and open communication between supervisors and subordinates—which is vital to the innovation process—would be established through this role-reversal process.

3. Hire Innovators

Researchers and practitioners alike have spent considerable time examining how best to hire innovative employees.15 Oftentimes, because of a lack of such knowledge, managers have relied on their instincts, speculation, and personal (necessarily limited) experience about what criteria will most likely lead to innovation success in subordinates.17 Given the growing recognition of the vital need for innovative employees, various resources and behavioral assessments have been developed for use by human resource managers during the selection process.

For example, the Innovation Potential Indicator is designed to assess an individual's capacity to enact innovative ideas across various work environments.18 Selection assessments that help identify innovators may include personality measures, openness to new experiences, situational judgment, and critical analyses.19 In this context, biographical information (e.g., asking candidates questions about past examples of innovative behavior in previous positions or during education experiences) may be particularly useful. Of important note, judgments about one's creativity can affect innovative behavior engagement (e.g., those who believe themselves to be innovative are more willing to engage in innovative behavior)20; therefore, asking about self-perceptions is helpful when seeking to hire innovators.

In the context of health technology companies, managers involved in the hiring process should test for indicators of innovative personalities, in addition to traditional testing and interviewing techniques used to vet prospective hires. Hiring recruiters can incorporate a “mini-project” in the application process to evaluate the applicant's ability to invent solutions, sift through options to select viable steps forward, and use technical problem-solving skills to address future challenges. In choosing innovative personalities, health technology companies can develop a team capable of inspiring innovation at every stage of device development.

Evidence has shown that people who perceive themselves to be innovative are more willing to engage in innovative behaviors. Therefore, when seeking to hire innovators, it's important to ask potential employees how they self-perceive their tendencies to innovate, as well as test for indicators of innovative personalities.

4. Schedule Time for Innovation

Although people often think of innovation as a randomly occurring creative endeavor, reframing innovation as a daily habit within the workplace can be valuable. The literature on habit building suggests that repetition and regularity is key to establishing new routines and habits,21 and innovative thinking is not unique in this respect. Formally scheduling time for innovation promotes creative thinking in three ways:

1. When employees are reminded and allowed room in their daily or weekly schedules for creative thinking, it creates an expectation that such a mindset is valued within the organization and the knowledge that they have the freedom for spending time on creative activities.

2. Having time for working through new ideas allows employees to become familiar with entering into this framework so that they are primed or cued to do so at regular intervals.22

3. Research has shown that intersecting routines (i.e., introducing a new routine into an existing routine) shifts salience between the existing and new routine.23 Thus, building these time blocks into an employee's routine should remind them to make connections throughout the week while they may be interacting with those outside of their department or field in their regular routine. Essentially, this enhances the salience of innovative thinking during other parts of the employee's workweek.

For health technology companies, a simple way to implement scheduled innovation is through monthly staff reports. Individual monthly reports across the organization may include key performance indicators (e.g., adverse event metrics, inventory turnover, on-time deliveries, cost of goods sold, operating margin). After staff members have filed their monthly reports, time can be set aside to discuss creative solutions to any issues highlighted through these indicators. The contribution of each staff member toward the monthly reporting process and meetings can facilitate a culture of scheduled innovation in which employees are regularly encouraged to identify problems.

Organization-Level Interventions

5. Embolden Intrapreneurship

Intrapreneurship is an increasingly acknowledged factor of success in today's business market.24 Intrapreneurship has been defined as organizational venture creation and strategic change instituted by employees.25 It involves capitalizing on the specific knowledge and expertise that individual employees have within their organizational context, encouraging them to use their knowledge, skills, and abilities to consider firm-level improvements that go beyond individual department or job roles.

Employees involved in the development of medical devices may have insight into how production can become more efficient, just as employees who are client facing are likely to have inside knowledge on the problems end users have with certain devices. Allowing such employees to work on solutions to these issues—and thereby acting as intrapreneurs—will serve to create value both for their organizations and customers.

Intrapreneurship has the potential to create new business for an organization and enhance an organization's ability to react to changes in their internal and external environment (e.g., the introduction of artificial intelligence in the medical device industry).26 Although strategic initiatives and change traditionally have been the purview of top management teams, companies have grown to realize that nonmanagerial employees have much to contribute to their organizations in terms of innovation and creativity that spur strategic change.26

Senior managers must play a central role in creating and communicating an organizational vision that allows for intrapreneurship, which in turn will empower employees to actively seek ways to improve their organizations. Creating an environment for intrapreneurship requires allowing employees to deviate from their formal work requirements—increasing their work contributions by generating and nurturing innovative ideas before presenting them to senior managers.27

In one outstanding example of strategic change instituted by employees, Andrew Kusters, a biomedical engineer at the Milwaukee VA Medical Center, took the intrapreneurial initiative to innovate around the standard documentation process of electrocardiogram (ECG) telemetry strips at his facility.28 The previous documentation system was overly laborious and susceptible to errors. A telemetry technician would first print out ECG waveforms, then a nurse would document, glue, and physically transport the strips to the medical records department to be scanned into electronic medical records (EMRs). To streamline the procedure, Kusters proposed adding functionality to the patient monitoring middleware to digitize the process. Following digitization, the ECG waveforms were able to be digitally documented, with the strips delivered electronically to the EMR system. This innovation dramatically improved the efficiency of ECG telemetry at the medical center, reducing chances for errors, optimizing nurse workflow, and increasing patient care and safety.

6. Build a Flat Organization

The rapid pace of change and technological growth, which affect both manufacturing and clinical development, have started to dictate an accelerated pace of organizational transformation.29 One of the ways to best address these changes lies in minimizing organizational layers (i.e., creating a flat organization).30

Flat organizational structures, which commonly are seen in smaller firms, are characterized by a minimal hierarchy, self-management, and a strong emphasis on empowerment.31 This type of structure is particularly inducive to encouraging innovative behavior for a number of reasons:

1. Flatter structure means that power is decentralized within the organization so that nonmanagerial employees need not seek approval through as many organizational layers (compared with a traditional, more hierarchical organizational structure) before pursuing a potential innovation.

2. The self-managerial aspect afforded by a flat structure allows employees to have the ability to allocate resources and time into their own creative projects, essentially allowing them the power to manage how they choose to achieve organizationally driven goals.

3. Flatter structures also mean that an organization can respond to changes in the external environment more quickly. Thus, when innovation is dictated by external pressures, it can be addressed and accomplished more readily.

Adopting a flatter organizational structure can be especially fruitful for health technology companies looking to innovate and challenge the status quo. For example, Maple, a rapidly growing virtual healthcare platform, uses a nonlayered communicative approach to decision-making and ideation, which in turn encourages the sharing of relevant information among employees.32

7. Embrace Failures

It must be acknowledged that a common outcome of pursuing innovation is failure.33 Not every idea will be a successful one, as issues can arise any time during the process (e.g., formulation, development, implementation). For example, a healthcare organization may not have the resources needed to pursue a new idea, customers may not feel a new medical device responds to their concerns, or the technology required to create the innovative product may still be in development or may not be cost-effective.

Knowing that most new ideas and business ventures fail,34 organizations and managers wishing to create a culture of innovation must be open to their employees and ideas failing, even at major expense to the organization. Humans naturally have a strong fear of failure across life domains, particularly when it comes to starting new ventures.35 Even research on institutional innovation often has avoided exploring the issue of innovation failure due to an antifailure bias.36

Overcoming this bias is essential for successfully implementing and disseminating a culture of innovation within one's organization. Top managers within healthcare firms must be open to embracing failure and disclosing their experiences with projects that were unsuccessful. This is particularly important in an industry such as the medical device sector, where the strong presence of regulatory bodies and numerous regulations that guide product development may create cultures that are highly risk averse and less open to experiences of failure.

Failure often is also a learning opportunity that leads to new potential and possibility, especially in the health technology industry. For example, Wilson Greatbatch's mistake in building a heart rhythm recorder led to the pivotal invention of the implantable pacemaker.37 In 1956, Greatbatch attempted to build an oscillator to record the heart sounds of his patients. However, he installed the wrong resistor into the device and the unit began to produce an electrical pulse rather than record the heartbeat of his patients, as was intended. Greatbatch noticed that this device could regulate the human heartbeat and, after two years of development, created the first implantable pacemaker. This was a radical improvement to apparatus used at the time to regulate the heart, which was as large as a television set and had limited portability.

Advances such as this have sprung from the willingness to embrace mistakes and allowing for the role that failure may take in the innovation process.

Conclusion

This article has presented seven ways in which a culture of innovation may be encouraged within the health technology industry, in both manufacturing and clinical applications. We have suggested that empowering employees to follow their creative inclinations, emboldening employees to act as intrapreneurs within organizations, and hiring those who already have an innovative spirit are important approaches. Examining the role of leaders, encouraging a servant leadership model in which leaders act to serve the growth of their subordinates, should be fruitful. In terms of structure, we have proposed that adopting a flat structure, in which power is more evenly dispersed, and being open to failure will help ease the innovation process. Last, making room for innovation on a regular basis and making innovation a habit rather than a unique occurrence should help establish innovation as a critical driver of organizational success.

Of important note, creating a culture in which failure is embraced, creativity is nurtured, and risk-taking is encouraged is not without its dangers. Organizations and managers must be cognizant of issues such as moral hazard and resource wasting, such that positive processes of innovation are installed without undue waste. One way to address these issues is to institute limits (both in terms of monetary and time resource allocation) that are provided to employees. Another technique is to insist on deep analysis and detailed recordkeeping of projects or innovations that have failed, in order to ensure that resources are not allocated to future endeavors with similar characteristics.