Orchestration Roles to Facilitate Networked Innovation in a Healthcare Ecosystem

The healthcare sector is currently facing a dramatic change brought about by the digitalization of services, more effective and cost-efficient care models, and selfcare promoting personalized healthcare (Caulfield & Donnelly, 2013). Increased costs and the promise of connected health technologies have created a need for innovations that increase patient satisfaction. This need for new technological innovations has also created new business opportunities for companies that target the medical market. A company’s success often depends on collaboration with other actors that influence the creation and delivery of their innovative technology solution (Valkokari et al., 2012). This dependency is particularly relevant in the healthcare context, where knowledge and resources need to be continuously distributed between different actors – such as doctors, nurses, patients, and companies – who have their specific features and motivations that need to be acknowledged. Networked innovation (i.e., negotiation in an ongoing purposeful communication and communicative process that relies on either a market or hierarchical mechanism of control; Swan & Scarbrough, 2005) is needed. Then, it is not always the central stakeholders that can do the best job in combining all the different elements and managing the context-related complexities, but different intermediaries may be needed for the coordination task.