Translating employee-driven innovation in healthcare: Bricolage and the mobilization of scarce resources

With top-down models of innovation failing to address the entrenched problems of healthcare, policy-makers have proposed that staff working on the frontline might be better placed to innovate solutions. Drawing on a study of employee-driven innovation in UK public healthcare, the authors explore the process through which staff innovate without the resources that support policy implementation, showing how the translation of ideas from problematization to practice is underpinned by ‘bricolage’—the appropriation and repurposing of resources ‘at hand’.