Beyond Tradition: Building the Organizational Infrastructure for Nursing Innovation

BackgroundInnovation is increasingly recognized as essential to addressing complex health-care challenges, including workforce shortages, rising costs, health inequities, and growing demands for high-quality care. Although nurses are uniquely positioned to identify opportunities for improvement, innovation efforts often encounter organizational barriers that limit their development and dissemination.PurposeTo synthesize evidence on the organizational conditions that support nursing innovation and propose a conceptual framework to guide innovation capacity within health-care organizations.MethodsAn integrative conceptual synthesis was conducted using literature from nursing, health-care innovation, organizational science, psychology, design, and innovation. Evidence was synthesized to identify recurring organizational conditions, processes, and structures associated with nursing innovation, and to develop the Nursing Innovation Ecosystem Model.ResultsThe literature suggests that innovation is best understood as an organizational capability rather than solely an individual attribute. Recurring organizational conditions included psychological safety, design thinking, protected time and resources, innovation structures, interdisciplinary collaboration, and organizational learning. These findings informed the proposed Nursing Innovation Ecosystem Model, which conceptualizes innovation as a dynamic organizational ecosystem in which individual nurse agency, organizational conditions, organizational processes, and organizational outcomes continuously interact to generate, sustain, and spread innovation.ConclusionsSustainable nursing innovation requires more than developing innovative individuals; it requires organizational environments that intentionally support innovation. The proposed Nursing Innovation Ecosystem Model provides a conceptual framework to guide leadership, education, organizational strategy, and future research aimed at strengthening nursing innovation capacity and supporting sustainable practice transformation.