Towards Fast and Engaging Health Care Innovation by Design

Abstract

This report describes a graduation project for the MSc Program Strategic Product Design. The client of this project is a University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. Due to privacy, the client is referred to as: “the Dutch UMC.” The Dutch UMC wants to become an innovating leader in health care but faces many problems during the act of innovation. Because the organization is struggling to locate, describe and tackle the encountered problems, a research project was set up to provide the organization with new tools to properly organize innovation. Therefore, the research question of this project is defined as: “how can the Dutch UMC realize innovation?”. This research resulted in defining seven problem areas which, each in their own way, have a negative impact on the innovation process. The shared cause for the defined problems is a defect in the current innovation process. Cooper (1993) divides the innovation process into six stages. When comparing these stages to the current process within the Dutch UMC, it becomes visible how the first three stages are neglected or skipped. These early stages of the innovation process are also referred to as the pre-development stages or the fuzzy front end (Hestatt and Verworn, 2004). Apart from sharing this insight with the organization, an innovation framework was created to organize the front end of the innovation process. This framework is based on design thinking, which is proposed as the most suitable method for non-design organizations to structure the front end of innovation. The framework delivers the required input to start the conversation on re-organizing innovation and start a transformation towards fast and engaging health care innovation by design.