ABSTRACT
Given the rapid pace of technological advancements and increasing competitive and financial pressures, healthcare firms have to deal with both product and service innovations originating from outside their own firm boundaries. The concept of open service innovation posits that applying a service-oriented logic to innovation and opening up firm boundaries can enable entrepreneurs to more effectively differentiate their business and improve their firm’s innovative activities. In this chapter, we provide insights into open innovation in general, and open service innovation in particular, and discuss the possible benefits of using crowdsourcing, a popular open innovation mechanism in for-profit organizations, to drive entrepreneurial behavior in healthcare, with a particular focus on healthcare service providers such as hospitals. To illustrate the possible workings and benefits of open innovation for healthcare, we will present an illustrative case vignette of The Royal Women’s Hospital, a large Australian metropolitan healthcare provider, which we develop from vivid, concrete, and rich qualitative data.
