Paul Coughlan

The book sets out to inform a broad range of professionals working in medicine and healthcare about how creative thinking and design concepts can be used to innovate in providing an enhanced patient experience. It outlines these concepts as a primary means to identify, clarify and resolve some of the process improvement and enhancement challenges in healthcare delivery. It demonstrates by example how such challenges can be addressed, drawing on case examples from healthcare and other industries, and from the authors’ own experiences as innovators and educators. It emphasizes the value of learning in action. For the reader who already has a leaning towards novel approaches to addressing healthcare delivery challenges, it provides guidance on harnessing team inputs and engaging with a network of contributors. It is an ideal resource for all working in medicine and healthcare, from managers, nurses, doctors, administrators, executives, and allied health professionals to medical engineers, medical physicists, medical scientists and medical product developers.Features Provides a unique framework to conceptualise innovation in healthcare and medicine. Authored by an award-winning medical scientist and an established business school Professor who have proven track-records with innovation, in education settings and as entrepreneurs. Presents a clear interdisciplinary approach, complemented with practical case studies set in the context of the challenges facing healthcare delivery in the 21st century.Dr. Barry McMahon has a national and international reputation as an Academic Medical Physicist in the fields of novel physiological measurement and medical device innovation and design. He is the co- inventor of the Functional Lumen Imaging Probe (FLIP) technique later commercialised as EndoFLIP™. He was the Director of the Innovation Academy at Trinity College Dublin from 2012 to 2017. Since 2020 he is advising Children’s Health Ireland on innovation practice. In 2021, he retired as Chief Physicist/Clinical Engineer at Tallaght Hospital, Ireland and currently runs his own innovation-consulting group Electric Mindset Ltd. Dr. Paul Coughlan is Professor in Operations Management and Co-Director of Faculty at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin. His research explores collaborative strategic improvement of operations through network action learning. He was the Director of the Innovation Academy at Trinity College Dublin from 2010 to 2012. He is a founding director of a research-based spin-out venture, Easy Hydro Ltd.

The book sets out to inform a broad range of professionals working in medicine and healthcare about how creative thinking and design concepts can be used to innovate in providing an enhanced patient experience. It outlines these concepts as a primary means to identify, clarify and resolve some of the process improvement and enhancement challenges in healthcare delivery. It demonstrates by example how such challenges can be addressed, drawing on case examples from healthcare and other industries, and from the authors’ own experiences as innovators and educators. It emphasizes the value of learning in action. For the reader who already has a leaning towards novel approaches to addressing healthcare delivery challenges, it provides guidance on harnessing team inputs and engaging with a network of contributors. It is an ideal resource for all working in medicine and healthcare, from managers, nurses, doctors, administrators, executives, and allied health professionals to medical engineers, medical physicists, medical scientists and medical product developers.Features Provides a unique framework to conceptualise innovation in healthcare and medicine. Authored by an award-winning medical scientist and an established business school Professor who have proven track-records with innovation, in education settings and as entrepreneurs. Presents a clear interdisciplinary approach, complemented with practical case studies set in the context of the challenges facing healthcare delivery in the 21st century.Dr. Barry McMahon has a national and international reputation as an Academic Medical Physicist in the fields of novel physiological measurement and medical device innovation and design. He is the co- inventor of the Functional Lumen Imaging Probe (FLIP) technique later commercialised as EndoFLIP™. He was the Director of the Innovation Academy at Trinity College Dublin from 2012 to 2017. Since 2020 he is advising Children’s Health Ireland on innovation practice. In 2021, he retired as Chief Physicist/Clinical Engineer at Tallaght Hospital, Ireland and currently runs his own innovation-consulting group Electric Mindset Ltd. Dr. Paul Coughlan is Professor in Operations Management and Co-Director of Faculty at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin. His research explores collaborative strategic improvement of operations through network action learning. He was the Director of the Innovation Academy at Trinity College Dublin from 2010 to 2012. He is a founding director of a research-based spin-out venture, Easy Hydro Ltd.

This text offers key insights, strategies, and tools to foster, promote, and integrate innovative improvements within small food firms. The book presents a characterization of the micro and small SME sector in Europe and emerging best practice in the area of food producing SME support including collaboration, knowledge exchange, technology transfer, entrepreneurship, and communication. The innovation strategy presented is underpinned by an experiential evidence base drawn from 3 years of SME support activities delivered to a European network of small food firms via the TRADEIT project and EU funded SME Support and development initiative. This book will instruct and engage practitioners in designing action plans to empower SMEs to innovate, source, integrate, and apply new knowledge, technologies, and partnerships. Open to Innovation: An approach to small and micro scale food enterprise development addresses innovation in small and micro scale SMEs by providing an actionable framework and insights on how to collaborate with the firms to identify appropriate improvement opportunities in line with absorptive capacities which will increase the intensity of knowledge transfer, resulting in improvements in innovation engagement, processing standards, operational, and management practices through developing skills, insights, and professional networks.

Improvement is fundamental to the competitiveness of networks and requires the participating firms to collaborate in identifying and introducing changes. This book presents collaborative strategic improvement as a cycle of activities in which firms in a network can engage together. Drawing on actual cases, authors link this cycle with disciplined action learning as a means of building upon experience generated through collaborative action. They describe how a network can learn from experience and deploy that learning in the marketplace. This unique book brings together the domains of operations management, organizational learning and action learning. From an operations management perspective, the work extends the established concept of strategic improvement in operations to the network within which firms collaborate to improve and to compete. From an action learning perspective, it draws on the emerging literature on network learning, re-frames the established concept of action learning as a learning mechanism and extends action learning into the network setting. Here, it values the inter-organizational insights that emerge through collaboration. Finally, the study articulates a philosophy and a framework for action learning research, extending the reach of action learning beyond practice to knowledge generation. Directed to researchers engaged in active intervention in improvement initiatives in organizations, this insightful book will prove to be a must-have resource. Also, it will appeal strongly to practitioners, including managers and action learning facilitators.Contents: 1. Overture; Part I: The Domains; Introduction to Part I; 2. Collaborative Strategic Improvement; 3. Learning in and Between Organizations; 4. Action Learning in and Between Organizations; 5. Intermission - The State of Our Understanding; Part II: Learning in Action; Introduction to Part II; 6. Collaborative Strategic Improvement Action Learning Programme Design; 7. Effecting Collaborative Operational Strategic Improvement in a Non-Contractual Setting; 8. Effecting Collaborative Operational Strategic Improvement in the Contractual Setting of an Extended Manufacturing Enterprise; Part III: Consolidation; Introduction to Part III; 9. Realizing Strategic Improvement; 10. Guidelines for Realizing Sustainable Strategic Improvement; 11. Action Learning Research in Inter-organizational Settings; 12. Finale; Appendices; Appendix I: National Action Learning Programme (NALP): Background and Overview; Appendix II: CO-IMPROVE: Background and Overview; Appendix III: Introductory Workshop on Action Learning