Flexible generification: ICT standardization strategies and service innovation in health care

Standards have played an important but often unrecognized role in the development of modern organizations. This role is accentuated by today’s growth of large business and government infrastructures, in the turbulent processes of globalization. In this paper, we investigate the relationships – and tensions – between standardization strategies and service innovation in the health-care sector. Our empirical material is seven longitudinal case studies in the Norwegian health-care sector, collected and analysed over a period of 20 years. We identify three generic standardization strategies; anticipatory standardization, integrated solutions and flexible generification. We argue that the first two strategies do not support service innovation while the strategy of flexible generification does so. We consider our results important for the evolution of the future ICT-enabled service economy.

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