Healthcare Transformation in the Era of Digital Connectivity. Comment on “What Managers Find Important for Implementation of Innovations in the Healthcare Sector – Practice Through Six Management Perspectives”

Mendonça, S., Damásio, B., Santiago, F., Chen, M., Santos, A. B., Cunha, M. P. E., & Nicita, A. (2022). Strategic Encounters in Innovation and Regulation: Healthcare Transformation in the Era of Digital Connectivity: Comment on "What Managers Find Important for Implementation of Innovations in the Healthcare Sector – Practice Through Six Management Perspectives". International Journal of Health Policy and Management, 11(12), 3114-3117. https://doi.org/10.34172/ijhpm.2022.7271 ---------Funding: Sandro Mendonça acknowledges support by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia), Portugal, by the Business Research Unit (BRU-IUL) and by UECE-REM (Research Unit on Complexity and Economics). BRU-IUL also benefited from grants UID/GES/00315/2013, UIDB/00315/2020; UIDB/05069/2020; PTDC/EGE-ECO/30690/2017 and is part of the project PTDC/EGE-ECO/30690/2017. Sandro Mendonça concluded the paper while he was Visiting Professor at the Dept. of Econoimics of the University of Insumbria, Italy, and he thanks the institution for the research context and support. Bruno Damásio acknowledges the financial support provided by FCT under the project UIDB/04152/2020 - Centro de Investigação em Gestão de Informação (MagIC). Martin Chen acknowledges the research context provided by the doctorate in management developed between ISCTE-IUL, Portugal, and the Southern Medical University, China. Miguel Cunha acknowledges funding by FCT (UID/ECO/00124/2019, UIDB/00124/2020 and Social Sciences DataLab, PINFRA/22209/2016), POR Lisboa and POR Norte (Social Sciences DataLab, PINFRA/22209/2016).Healthcare innovations emerge and develop in institutionally dense selective environments. New projects and propositions in healthcare sectoral ecosystems can be understood as product-service compacts, that is, complex solutions that dynamically integrate tangible and intangible elements in close interaction with users’ needs and the evolving regulatory context under uncertainty and ambiguity. We advance the concept of “strategic encounters” to encapsulate, capitalise and extend the contribution by Palm and Fischier’s on the key enabling managerial factors for healthcare innovation implementation under conditions of imperfect foresight. We intertwine creative assemblages that shape the formation of knowledge-intensive activities at the operators’ level with scope of sectoral level interventions to underscore how the opportunities and constraints can enhance innovation for the common good. We use the case of digital data health regulatory agendas as illustration. We argue that this broader perspective on healthcare transformation is theoretically pertinent and practically useful, for management and policy.publishersversionpublishe