Framing service innovation in healthcare

Abstract: Healthcare faces multiple challenges. Besides a raging pandemic have the number of people struggling with mental illness and chronic illnesses increased. Service innovation is a possible way of meeting these problems. However, service innovation is a scattered concept, with many different conceptualizations and schools of thought, all providing vital research aspects. Research has unraveled three elements that form different approaches for service innovation research. Healthcare also offers a complex context for conducting change and service innovation, containing prerequisites challenging previous understanding and conceptualizations of service innovation.To study service innovation in healthcare and to clarify research, this thesis aims to develop a framework for service innovation that relates and differentiates three approaches and their key characteristics and to determine how the prerequisites for healthcare relate to this framework, and finally to study, test, and illustrate the framework in the empirical context. The thesis builds upon three studies and four individual papers. The studies consist of one literature review, providing the conceptual groundwork for constructing the framework, and two empirical studies assessing and further developing the framework. The individual papers uses the empirical studies and depart from the different approaches to service innovation and healthcare prerequisites, providing key insights and clarifying the different approaches' strengths and weaknesses. The proposed framework recognizes the need for multiple service innovation research approaches since no single approach is enough to study the multifaceted service innovation phenomena in healthcare. The individual papers also contribute to the growing literature stream addressing service innovation in healthcare by describing social entrepreneurs' motivation during the service innovation process and explaining some of the effects of different service innovation types.