A Community's Impact on The Innovation Process : A study within the healthcare sector

Sammanfattning: Today's increasing world population has put a strain on the healthcare system due to the spread of diseases that requires new knowledge and technology. As a consequence, problems regarding medical errors and quality can lead to the cause of death. However, salvation to these problems can be innovative solutions. Moreover, the shown difficulties to implement innovations in the healthcare market can be improved by innovating according to, and together with, the end-users, which can be achieved through firm-hosted user- communities. This study aimed to examine the innovation process within a host-firm community with several user-communities in the healthcare market. Consequently, the contribution of the research consists of extending the knowledge about the communication flow within a host-firm community with several user-communities as well as the characteristics of the innovations that get developed and realized by the host-firm. This was examined through a qualitative approach with the main methodology of semi-structured interviews. The collected data was further analyzed through a thematic approach and viewed through a constructed conceptual lens. The conceptual lens constitutes a combination of Rogers’s theory of communication channels and the convergence model of communication, as well as Rogers perceived characteristics of innovation. The outcome of this study portrays the innovation process within the setup of a host-firm community with several user-communities. In other terms, the identified communication flows were between the host-firm and user- communities, between the user-communities and within the user- communities, where the one between user-communities was shown to be almost non-existent in this study. However, the innovation ideas that are transferred in an iterative process within the community resulted in innovation with the characteristics of being a relative advantage, complex and observable.